Collections

The Library of Congress collects intensively in all areas of science and technology, including engineering, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, public health, earth sciences, agriculture, military science, and naval science, with the exception of clinical medicine and technical agriculture, which are subject specialties of the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library.  Business collections cover all of the major areas of business and economics including U.S. and international business and industry, small business, real estate, management and labor, finance and investment, insurance, money and banking, commerce, public finance, and economics.

Science and business subjects have been represented in the Library of Congress collections from the beginning. Jefferson’s Library, acquired in 1815, contained some 500 volumes in natural philosophy, agriculture, chemistry, zoology, and technical arts, and an even larger number relating to economics and commerce. In 1866, an agreement with the Smithsonian Institution transferred over 500,000 volumes from their collections and merged them with the Library's general collections and rare book collections, considerably broadening the science and technology collections. The science and business collection has grown through purchases, copyright deposit, and gifts, and today comprises what is now over 40 percent of the Library’s general collections.

The Science and Business collections are particularly strong for their historical research value, with long runs of trade and scientific journals, proceedings, cookbooks, bibliographies, industrial directories, company histories, and technical dictionaries. Relevant science and business materials are also dispersed throughout the special collections of the Library, such as Prints & Photographs, Manuscripts, Rare Books, and Geography & Maps.

The Science and Business Reading Room is the service point to the general collections, special format materials, technical reports, standards, and specialized archival collections, in addition to a large number of subscription databases, digital collections, and web archives.

  • Technical Reports and Standards The Science Section is the custodian of more than 5 million technical reports, tens of thousands of standards primarily from U.S. issuing organizations and specialized historical and archival collections in science and business subjects.
  • Digital Collections In an ongoing effort to make more of the Library's collections freely available online to researchers, science and business specialists work in cooperation with the Library’s digitization initiative and other partners to select items for the Science and Business Reading Room digital collections.
  • Web Archives Science and Business Specialists collect information through web archiving to ensure preservation and access to ephemeral, born-digital web content. While many Library of Congress web archive collections are freely available following a one-year embargo, some rights restricted content is only viewable on-site.