Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the unofficial national library of the United States. With over 128 million items, it is the second largest library in the history of the world, surpassed only by the British Library, which contains over 150 million items. With over 530 miles of shelves, the Library of Congress certainly is the longest library in the world. Its collections include more than 28 million cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 50 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America, including a Gutenberg Bible; and the world's largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings.

Holdings

The Library developed a system of book classification called Library of Congress Classification (LC) which is used by most research and university libraries, although most public libraries continue to use the Dewey decimal system.

Related Topics:
Library of Congress Classification - University libraries - Public libraries - Dewey decimal system

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The Library serves as a legal repository to guarantee copyright protection. All authors seeking American copyright registration are required to submit two copies of their works to the Library. Largely due to this provision of the copyright law, nearly 22,000 new items published in the U.S. arrive every business day at the Library. Contrary to popular belief, however, the Library does not retain all of these works in its permanent collection, although it does add an average of 10,000 items per day.

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It is estimated that the print holdings of the Library of Congress would, if digitized and stored as plain text, constitute 17 to 20 terabytes of information. This leads to the commonly-repeated but misleading equivalence of 20 terabytes to the entire holdings of the Library. Occasionally, this figure has been referred to as a data transfer rate, LoCs/s- Libraries of Congress per Second- and equates to 20 terabytes of data transferred per second, even though the 20 terabyte estimation is misleading. Only selected portions of the print holdings have actually been digitized, and the Library currently has no plans for systematic digitization of any significant portion of its books. The Library makes millions of digital objects, comprising tens of terabytes, available at its American Memory site. American Memory is a source for public domain image resources, as well as audio, video, and archived Web content. Nearly all of the lists of holdings, the catalogs of the library, can be consulted directly on its web site. Librarians all over the world consult these catalogs, through the Web or through other media better suited to their needs, when they need to catalog for their collection a book published in the United States. They use the Library of Congress Control Number to make sure of the exact identity of the book.

Related Topics:
Terabytes - Data transfer - American Memory - Public domain - Library of Congress Control Number

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The Library of Congress also provides an on-line archive of the proceedings of the U.S. Congress at Thomas, including bill text, Congressional Record text, bill summary and status, the Congressional Record Index, and the United States Constitution.

Related Topics:
U.S. Congress - Congressional Record - United States Constitution

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The Library also administers the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, a talking and braille library program provided to more than 766,000 Americans.

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