General Information
The Library of Congress occupies three buildings on Capitol Hill. The Thomas Jefferson Building (1897) is the original separate Library of Congress building. (The Library began in 1800 inside the U.S. Capitol.) The John Adams Building was built in 1938 and the James Madison Memorial Building was completed in 1981. Other facilities include the High Density Storage Facility (2002) at Fort Meade, Md., and the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation (2007) in Culpeper, Va.
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Collections
Today's Library of Congress is an unparalleled world resource. The collection includes millions cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages; millions of manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America; and the world's largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings.
Year 2022 at a Glance
In fiscal year 2022 (October 2021 to September 2022), the Library of Congress ...
Responded to more than 481,000 reference requests from Congress, the public and other federal agencies, including the direct use of Congressional Research Service reports;
Welcomed about 370,000 onsite visitors to its Capitol Hill campus and recorded more than 151.6 million visits and 520.3 million page views on the Library's web properties;
Issued more than 484,600 copyright registrations and recorded 14,700 documents containing more than 1.1 million works;
Circulated more than 22.3 million copies of braille, audio and large-print items to blind and print disabled patrons;
Circulated 243,700 physical items for use inside and outside the Library;
Performed approximately 8.7 million preservation actions on items in the Library’s physical collections, with an additional 5.7 million pages of materials prepared and shipped to vendors for preservation reformatting services;
Placed more than 5.9 million items under inventory control in its preservation facility at Fort Meade and more than 2.4 million at the Cabin Branch facility;
Recorded more than 175.77 million items in its collections, including:
- more than 25.49 million cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
- more than 15.87 million items in the nonclassified print collections, including books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports and other printed material
- more than 134.4 million items in the nonclassified (special) collections, including:
- 4.2 million audio materials (discs, tapes, talking books and other recorded formats)
- 77 million manuscripts
- 5.8 million maps
- 17.5 million microforms
- 1.8 million moving images
- 8.2 million items of sheet music
- 15.2 million photographs
- 864,000 posters, prints and drawing
- 2 million other items (including machine-readable items);
Employed 3,172 permanent staff members; and
Operated with a total budget authority of $838.9 million, including $794 million in appropriations and $45 million in offsetting receipts authority.