Library of Congress


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Congress, Library of:

see Library of CongressLibrary of Congress,
national library of the United States, Washington, D.C., est. 1800. It occcupies three buildings on Capitol Hill: The Thomas Jefferson Building (1897), the John Adams Building (1938), and the James Madison Building (1981).
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.

Library of Congress,

national library of the United States, Washington, D.C., est. 1800. It occcupies three buildings on Capitol Hill: The Thomas Jefferson Building (1897), the John Adams Building (1938), and the James Madison Building (1981).

Thomas Jefferson while vice president was a prime mover in the creation of the library, and he supported it strongly during his presidency. In 1814, when much of the collection was destroyed by fire, Jefferson offered his own fine library to the Congress. This formed the basis of the collection until 1851, when fire destroyed some 35,000 volumes. The growth of the library progressed slowly thereafter until the passage of the Copyright Act of 1870, which required the deposit in the library of all copyright material. The acquisition in 1866 of the Smithsonian Institution's collection of 44,000 volumes and the purchase of the Peter Force collection of Americana (60,000 volumes; 1867) and the Joseph M. Toner American and Medical Library (24,000 volumes; 1892) made it one of the world's great libraries.

Originally primarily intended to serve the legislative branch of the government, it is now open to the public as a reference library and sends out many books through an interlibrary loan system. It has African and Middle Eastern, Asian, European, and Hispanic divisions; a law library; and excellent collections of manuscripts, periodicals, monographs and serials, incunabulaincunabula
, plural of incunabulum
[Late Lat.,=cradle (books); i.e., books of the cradle days of printing], books printed in the 15th cent. The known incunabula represent about 40,000 editions.
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, geography and maps, rare books, prints and photographs, motion pictures, music and recordings, sheet music, science and technology, visual materials, microforms, and computer files, representing materials in more than 450 languages.

The Library of Congress contains more than 138 million items, including about 21 million books, 5 million maps, and 61 million manuscripts. Its Online Catalog provides a database of some 12 million items from its collections. The library sells duplicate catalog entries to smaller libraries for the books it adds to its collections. It provides other vital services to libraries through its many bibliographic functions (among them maintaining the National Union Catalog of the holdings of 700 large libraries in the United States and running the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped) and its Copyright Office. The library's Poetry and Literature Center (est. 1936) is the home of the U.S. poet laureatepoet laureate
, title conferred in Britain by the monarch on a poet whose duty it is to write commemorative odes and verse. It is an outgrowth of the medieval English custom of having versifiers and minstrels in the king's retinue, and of the later royal patronage of poets, such
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. The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, opened in Culpeper, Va., in 2007, is the home of the library's large film and recording collection. Mainly supported by congressional appropriations, the library also has income from gifts by foundations and individuals, administered by the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board.

Bibliography

See studies by P. M. Angle (1958), G. Gurney (1966), M. McCloskey (1968), C. A. Goodrum (1974, rev. ed. 1982), and J. Conaway (2000).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia™ Copyright © 2013, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/

Library of Congress

Serves as the national library of the United States; maintains collections of manuscripts, photographs, maps and related historical documents, preserves its own building, and produces publications and exhibits. It is the repository for HABS and HAER documentation.
Illustrated Dictionary of Architecture Copyright © 2012, 2002, 1998 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Library of Congress

 

the national library of the USA, located in Washington, D.C.; one of the largest libraries in the world. It was founded in 1800 by the Congress of the USA. It serves primarily governmental organs, research institutions, scholars, private firms, and industrial companies.

According to 1968 data, the holdings of the Library of Congress amounted to 14.5 million books and brochures, 132,000 volumes of bound newspapers, more than 29 million items of manuscript materials, 3.3 million items of musical scores, more than 3 million maps, and many other materials, including motion-picture films, phonograph records, and microfilms. The annual increase in holdings of the Library of Congress ranges from 1 to 3 million items. In content the collections are almost universal (except for foreign medical and agricultural literature, which is collected by the national medical and agricultural libraries). Most fully represented is literature on law, history, philology, politics, natural sciences, and technology, as well as reference and bibliographical publications. The Library of Congress possesses more than 5,500 incunabula, the libraries of T. Jefferson and a number of other presidents of the USA, collections of works of Chinese literature (330,000 volumes) and Japanese literature (450,000 volumes), and collections of rare American editions (60,000 volumes). In 1907 the Library of Congress acquired the library of the Krasnoiarsk merchant and bibliophile G. V. Iudin, which consists of 41,000 books and journals, mostly on Russian history. (At the present time the Library of Congress has approximately 300,000 publications in the Russian language.)

The Library of Congress has 18 reading rooms with 1,460 seats for readers. Of the bibliographical publications of the Library of Congress, the most important are The National Union Catalog, which has been published monthly since 1958, and a union catalog of books in the libraries of the USA (610 volumes).

REFERENCE

Mearns, D. C. The Story Up to Now: The Library of Congress,1800–1946. Washington, 1947.

B. P. KANEVSKII

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
Links to significant related primary source documents in the Library of Congress or National Archives are included with many topics.
According to the Library of Congress (2012, METS Web Site), "The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium." The Library of Congress offers information on external schemas that can be used with METS.
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world.
Steno court reporters have the unique talent to record and transcribe the spoken word almost instantaneously, and NCRF serves as the conduit between them and the 85,000 recorded stories at the Library of Congress. Since 2011, the NCRF has made a special effort to collect the recollections of DAV members through a grant from the DAV Charitable Service Trust," said B.J.
One of the library experiences that changed my life was walking into a special Jefferson exhibit in the Library of Congress in 2000, thanks to a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship.
The first few articles provide quick summaries of the history of both the Library of Congress and the Center for the Book.
Running till 28 July, 2012, the exhibition spotlights the rich dance, music, theatre, and design collections of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, including the Aaron Copland Collection, Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation Collection and Daniel Nagrin Collection.
Peter TerVeer filed a complaint of discrimination based on sexual orientation against his employer, the Library of Congress.
Net Insight's Nimbra carrier-class media switch router (MSR) will transport video from the fiber ring location of the House and Senate to the Library of Congress' National Audio Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC).
TELECOMWORLDWIRE-May 5, 2011-Trusted Translations selected by US Library of Congress to translate World Digital Library(C)1994-2011 M2 COMMUNICATIONS http://www.m2.com
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC will inaugurate an online exhibition featuring the materials available for research at that Library in 2010.

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