The Library of Congress holds over 138 million items in its collections. But as these overviews demonstrate, it is the relationship among the materials that makes this collection more than a repository of millions of individual items.
Since its founding in 1800, the Library has collected materials without regard to format, language, or subject. The only exception has been the Library's policy of not collecting materials in the areas of clinical medicine or technical agriculture, as these are the responsibilities of the other two national libraries: the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library.
The Library's acquisitions policies are based on the fundamental principles that the Library should possess:
- All books and other library materials necessary to the Congress and the various officers of the Federal Government to perform their duties.
- All books and other materials that record the life and achievement of the American people.
- Records of other societies, past and present, especially of those societies and peoples whose experience is of the most immediate concern to the people of the United States.
These principles comprise the underlying premise that allows the Library to implement the overall mission to make its resources available and useful to Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.
The Library's collections are based on the Jeffersonian ideal that all subjects will be of interest and value to Congress and, by extension, to the scholar and researcher.
The Library defers to the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library for clinical and technical materials in their respective fields. The Library defers to the Center for Research Libraries for unpublished foreign doctoral dissertations.
The Library does not acquire all published materials but selects from copyright deposits and other sources based on policies designed to insure that the Library acquires important and scholarly works.
In many of the special format collections, emphasis is on acquiring and recording publications related to the history and culture of America, with representative samples acquired from other countries.
The Collections Overviews will be reviewed and updated on a regular cycle. The Law Library of Congress coordinates the drafting of the Law Collection Overview; the rest are coordinated by Library Services.
