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Children's Literature Center
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About the Collections

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The Children's Literature Center assists users in gaining access to all children's materials dispersed throughout the Library. The Library holds between 500,000 and 600,000 children's books and periodicals including maps, visual and audio media and secondary material.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 164 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 38 million books and other printed materials, 3.6 million recordings, 14 million photographs, 5.5 million maps, 8.1 million pieces of sheet music and 70 million manuscripts of more than 130 million items. They can be searched and in many cases retrieved by accessing the Library's online catalog.

Most children's books are held in the Library's General Collections, including fiction, poetry and folklore in English and some European languages are housed off-site and need to be requested in advance. However, non-fiction children's books are scattered throughout the Library's complex collections. For example, non-English language children's books are housed in the respective language divisions; maps for children are held by the Geography and Map Reading Room; bound children's periodicals are shelved in the general collection and more recent unbound periodicals are in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room; rare children's books are housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room; children's books with musical scores can be found in the Performing Arts Reading Room; original children's book art is in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room; children's books in Braille are held by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped; and television programs for children are in the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room.

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  October 20, 2022
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