During the 2012 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, nearly six million items from the library’s collections were bound, repaired, mass-deacidified, microfilmed or reformatted for restoration. Most of these programs will experience cuts in coming months.

Fantasia, the R&B star and one-time “American Idol” winner, recently slipped into the library to register a song for copyright, another of the library’s most visible and important functions. Last year the library registered more than 511,500 claims to copyright, many of which fill the storage rooms and off-site locations, walls of hopes and dreams.

Roughly 2,000 new items are filed per day. “People will write a poem on a piece of paper and send it in to get it registered,” said David Christopher, chief of operations for the library’s Copyright Office. “Then they will call and ask, ‘Did you get my poem?’ They’re passionate about it. To them, it’s their creative output.”

The office contributed more than 636,000 copies of books, serial publications, motion pictures, sound recordings, printed music and other creative works to the library’s collection last year; the average annual value of newly copyrighted works is $30 million.

Often the library will have one of the few remaining or sole copies of something that seemed insignificant when it was registered but becomes important with the flow of time. For example, President Obama’s father wrote a book in the 1960s in Luo, his tribal dialect, to promote adult literacy in Kenya. It was stored and cataloged with little interest after it was contributed by the library’s field office in Nairobi; today it is one of only four known copies.

Just when Congress has been contemplating new copyright laws to address technological challenges and serve the public interest, the budget for the Copyright Office has fallen by 8.4 percent since fiscal 2010. With 44 employees having taken early retirement, the office’s staff is now 18 percent below the authorized level. Digitalization has been viewed lately as an especially vital part of the library’s mission, given its potential to make parts of the collection available to those who cannot make the trek to Washington. (A tiny portion of the collection is currently available digitally.)