The team responsible for design and construction of Book Storage Module 2 at Fort Meade, Md., cut a ribbon to open the Library's off-site storage addition on May 23. From left are Stephen Ayers, Architect of the Capitol superintendent of the Library; John Tressler of the John C. Grimberg Co. Inc.; Pat Caulfield of Coakley Williams Construction; Steven J. Herman, chief of the Library's Collections, Access, Loan and Management Division; Lt. Col. J.T. Hand, deputy commander of the Baltimore District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and architect Charles Enos of Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture & Engineering, PC. - Gail Fineberg
During 2005 the size of the Library's collections grew to more than 132 million items, an increase of 2 million over the previous year. This figure included more than 30 million cataloged books and other print materials, 59 million manuscripts, 14 million microforms, 5.2 million maps, 5.4 million items in the music collection, nearly 14 million visual materials, 2.8 million audio materials and more than one million items in miscellaneous formats.
Integrated Library System. The Library of Congress Integrated Library System (LC ILS) performs routine library functions such as circulation, acquisitions and serials check-in. The LC ILS also provides access to the Library's Online Public Access Catalog. In November the Library converted its database of more than 34 million records to Unicode, thereby allowing bibliographic records to display in non-Roman scripts. The Library has been cataloging in non-Roman scripts for more than 20 years, but the software was unable to display non-Roman characters until this upgrade to Unicode.
Arrearage Reduction/Cataloging. During the year, the Bibliographic Access Divisions and Serial Record Division cataloged a record total of 312,818 bibliographic volumes. Production of full- and core-level original cataloging totaled 185,531 bibliographic records. Cataloging staff also created 55,925 copy cataloging records and 28,993 minimal-level cataloging records.
With the Library serving as the secretariat for the international Program for Cooperative Cataloging, member institutions created 171,988 new name authorities and 5,916 new or updated subject and classification authorities. In addition, the Library contributed 88,828 new name authorities, 9,056 new series authorities, and 6,678 new subject headings.
Secondary Storage. With support from Congress, the Library continued to fill new storage units at Fort Meade, Md. During the year Module 1 at Fort Meade was filled to capacity with nearly 1.6 million monographs and bound periodicals. Module 2 was completed in May with a capacity for 3.3 million monographs and bound serials.
Planning continued for the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) in Culpeper, Va., scheduled to open in November 2006. The 45-acre NAVCC campus is being built with private-sector support from the Packard Humanities Institute and will consist of four building components totaling 420,000 square feet of space for the Library's recorded sound, videotape, safety film and nitrate film collections. The site will also consolidate the activities of the Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division in one location.
Important New Acquisitions. The Library receives millions of items each year from copyright deposits, federal agencies, and purchases, exchanges and gifts. Significant acquisitions made possible by the Madison Council during the year included retrospective acquisitions, including a rare photograph of Sam Houston, the "Middlesex Gazette" (Middletown, Conn.) edition of Dec. 27,1799, a set of eight White House views from the Detroit Publishing Company ca. 1904 and a Philip Trager Taos church photograph.
- The Library acquired the following significant items and collections in 2005: Papers of Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
- Papers of the late Katharine Graham, executive officer and publisher of The Washington Post.
- More than 20,000 items including drawings, models and business papers from world-renowned architect I.M. Pei.
- Significant additions to the Iranian collections, including 20 books given by the National Library of Iran to the Librarian of Congress in honor of his visit to Iran.
- Nearly 20,000 individual submissions to the Veterans History Project, comprising some 80,000 items, documenting the experiences of the nation's war veterans.
- The first groupof digitally recorded interviews, capturing personal histories of Americans from all walks of life, as part of the StoryCorps Project.
