Library of Congress, thede facto nationallibrary of theUnited States and the largest library in the world. Its collection was growing at a rate of about two million items per year; it reached more than 170 million items in 2020. The Library ofCongress serves members, committees, and staff of the U.S.Congress, other government agencies, libraries throughout the country and the world, and the scholars, researchers, artists, and scientists who use its resources. It is the national centre for library service to theblind and physically handicapped, and it offers manyconcerts, lectures, and exhibitions for the general public. Those outside theWashington,D.C., area have access to the library’s growing electronic resources through the Library of Congress website at http://www.loc.gov.

The library was founded on April 24, 1800, when U.S. Pres.John Adams approved the $5,000 appropriated by Congress when the U.S. capital moved fromPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, to Washington, D.C. It was housed within the newCapitol building, where it remained for nearly a century. However, on August 24, 1814, during theWar of 1812, the library’s original collection of 3,000 volumes was destroyed when the British burned the Capitol as well as theWhite House. To rebuild the library’s collection, Congress, on January 30, 1815, approved the purchase of former presidentThomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950. On Christmas Eve 1851, another fire destroyed two-thirds of the collection. Many of the volumes have since been replaced.

Librarian of CongressAinsworth Rand Spofford (1864–97) was the first to propose that the library be moved to a dedicated building. He also was instrumental in establishing thecopyright law of 1870, which placed the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress and required anyone seeking acopyright to provide two copies of the work—books, pamphlets, maps, photographs, music, and prints—to the library.

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Largely as a result of Spofford’s vision, the library’s burgeoning collection outgrew its space in the Capitol. In the early 21st century the Library of Congress complex on Capitol Hill included three buildings containing 21 public reading rooms. TheThomas Jefferson Building (originally called the Congressional Library, or Main Building) houses the Main Reading Room. Designed in Italian Renaissance style, it was completed in 1897 and magnificently restored 100 years later. TheJohn Adams Building, completed in 1939, received its current name in 1980 to honour the president who in 1800 signed the act of Congress establishing the library. The Adams Building was built inArt Deco style and faced with white Georgia marble. TheJames Madison Memorial Building, modern in style, was dedicated in 1980. (That same year the Main Building was designated the Thomas Jefferson Building.) The Madison Building more than doubled the library’s available Capitol Hill space. The continued growth of the collection in a wide variety of formats during the 1980s and ’90s necessitated the off-site relocation of some materials to storage facilities in Fort Meade, Maryland, and to the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper,Virginia, the library’s state-of-the-art facility for audiovisual preservation.

On an average workday, the library receives approximately 22,000 items and adds approximately 10,000 of these to its collections. Thevast majority of works in the library’s collections are received through the copyright deposit process mentioned above. Materials are also acquired through gifts, purchases, and donations from private sources and other government agencies (state, local, and federal), the library’s Cataloging in Publication program (a prepublication arrangement with publishers), and exchanges with libraries in the United States and abroad. Those items that are not selected for the library’s collections or exchange programs are offered free to other federal agencies, educational institutions, public libraries, or nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations. In 2020 the library’s holdings included more than 25 million cataloged books, 74.5 million manuscripts, 5.6 million maps, 8.2 million items of sheet music, 4.2 million audio materials, and 17.3 million visual materials.

Approximately half of the library’sbook and serial collections are in languages other than English. More than 460 languages are represented. Particularly noteworthy are the library’s preeminent collections in Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese; the largest collections in many Slavic and Asian languages outside those geographic areas; the world’s largest law library; and the largest rare-book collection inNorth America (more than 800,000 volumes and various other items, including pamphlets and posters), which features the mostcomprehensive collection of 15th-century books in theWestern Hemisphere. The Manuscript Division holds the papers of 28 U.S. presidents, ranging in time fromGeorge Washington toCalvin Coolidge, along with those of many Supreme Courtjustices and other high-ranking government officials, of inventors such asAlexander Graham Bell and theWright brothers, of social reformers such asSusan B. Anthony andFrederick Douglass, and of cultural figures such asWalt Whitman,Irving Berlin, andMartha Graham.

The Library of Congress provides direct research assistance to theU.S. Congress through the Congressional Research Service (originally the Legislative Reference Service), which was founded in 1914. Established in 1832, the Law Library provides Congress with comprehensive research on foreign, comparative, international, and U.S. law, drawing upon its collection of more than 2.9 million volumes.

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The Library of Congress is supported by direct appropriations from Congress—as well as gifts and private donations—and has been governed since 1800 by the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress. Established in 1990, theJames Madison Council—the library’s first private-sector advisory group—has supported the acquisition of hundreds of collection items (such as the 1507map by the German cartographerMartin Waldseemüller that first used the word “America”) andinitiatives such as the annual National Book Festival (launched in 2001). The council’s first chairman,John W. Kluge, also endowed a major scholarly centre and a $1 million prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities.

In addition to the Kluge Prize, the library sponsors many privately endowed honours and awards recognizing creativity and achievement in the humanities. These include thepoet laureate position, the LivingLegend medal, the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, and the national Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, through which the library honours those who have advanced and embodied the ideals of individual creativity withconviction, dedication, scholarship, and exuberance.

In 1988, the National Film Preservation Act created theNational Film Registry, which is a list of movies selected for preservation by the Library of Congress. Every year, 25 films that have been deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” to the country’sfilm heritage are added to the registry. While the selections are typically American movies, any work “originally created on film stock” is eligible.

In 1994 the Library of Congress launched theNational Digital Library Program (NDLP), making freely available on the Internet high-quality electronic versions of American historical material from the library’s special collections. By the end of the library’s bicentennial year in 2000, more than five million items (manuscripts, films, sound recordings, and photographs) had beenmounted on the library’sAmerican Memory website, which continued to expand rapidly. The primary source files were made available for classroom use by educators as part of the library’s Teaching with Primary Sources Program. Also accessible on the website are the library’s exhibitions, bibliographic databases (online public access catalog and online print and photograph catalog), a comprehensive public legislativeinformation system known as Congress.gov, copyright information, and a Global Gateway website for the library’s international collections and collaborative digital libraries built with international partners.

Inspired by the success of the Global Gateway site, in 2005 Librarian of CongressJames H. Billington proposed a project called theWorld Digital Library. Its goal was to make available to anyone with access to the Internet digitized texts and images of “unique and rare materials from libraries and other cultural institutions around the world.” It was designed to be searchable in seven languages—Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish (official languages of the United Nations) as well as Portuguese. In 2007 the Library of Congress and UNESCO signed an agreement to build a World Digital Library (WDL) website, which was launched in 2009 with approximately 1,200 digitized exhibits, including books, maps, and paintings. In 2012, 161 partners in 75 countries provided content to the site. Theinitiative ended in 2020, and the WDL collection became available on the Library of Congress site. The library is also leading theNational Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, a collaborative effortmandated in 2000 by Congress to preserve the country’s digital assets.