Skip to main content

MCC Daily Tribune Archive

National Library Week


The Library of Congress

“Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing the mission.”     -- Bill Gates

Following are some facts about our national library, the Library of Congress, as gathered from the Library of Congress’ website ( "https://www.loc.gov" www.loc.gov):

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with nearly 128 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, 5 million music items and 57 million manuscripts.

The Library receives approximately 22,000 items each working day and adds approximately 10,000 items to the collections daily. The majority of the collections are received through the copyright registration process, as the Library is home to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Approximately half of the Library’s book and serial collections are in languages other than English. Some 460 languages are represented in the collections.

The oldest example of printing in the world – passages from a Buddhist sutra, or discourse, printed in 770 A.D. – is housed in the Library’s Asian Division. The oldest written material in the Library is a cuneiform tablet dating from 2040 B.C.

Foremost among the Manuscript Division’s holdings are the papers of 23 presidents, ranging from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge.

The Gutenberg Bible, one of the treasures of the Library of Congress, was purchased in 1930. It is one of three perfect copies on vellum in the world.

With more than 1.5 million items, the Archive of Folk Culture in the American Folklife Center is the largest repository of traditional cultural documentation in the United States and one of the largest in the world. It contains the largest collection of American Indian music and spoken word, including the earliest ethnographic field recordings made anywhere in the world.

The Library has the largest and most comprehensive collection of U.S. Ph.D. dissertations in the nation, numbering about 1 million titles on paper, microfilm and microfiche.

Lori Annesi
Library
04/12/2005