Chapter 9: The Library and You: Main Reading Room Overlook

Transcript

The Main Reading Room below is the heart of the Library. While called the Library of Congress, this is America’s National Library, a library you can use. In addition to welcoming people to tour the building, visit exhibits, and attend programs, we welcome anyone in the world who is age 16 years or older to sign up for a Reader’s Card to conduct unlimited, free research.

In the middle of the Main Reading Room, you can see the central desk where researchers receive their books. Those books are brought up from storage areas across Capitol Hill and beyond. Around the walls are alcoves filled with about 80,000 books. That’s a small fraction of the more than 51 million catalogued books in the collections. In all, the Library holds over 173 million items in different formats, including sound recordings, film, born-digital content and more. Spread out across our Capitol Hill campus, other reading rooms focus on specific subject areas, including the Science, Technology and Business Reading Room; Geography and Maps Division, Performing Arts Reading Room, and the Prints and Photographs Division, just to name a few.

Each working day, the staff here receive and process some 15,000 items and add more than 10,000 to the collections. And, each day writers, filmmakers, musicians, genealogists and lifelong learners also conduct original research here. If you were to join them, what might you be interested in discovering? What materials might you consult? As eighth Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam said, “A book used, after all, is fulfilling a higher mission than a book which is merely being preserved for possible future use.”

Now, let’s take a look up at the dome above us. You’ll see a large mural, featuring twelve seated figures, created by artist Edwin Blashfield. They represent countries, cultures, or time periods that were thought to have contributed the most to western civilization in 1897, when the building was constructed. For example, Egypt, one of the twelve seated figures, represents the invention of the written word, and “Islam” represents developments in physics, mathematics and medicine. Look for America, which represents science and scientific achievement. The seated figure may look familiar too—it is modeled on President Lincoln. This mural celebrates knowledge and learning across cultures and time, just as our collections span regions and eras of human history. For a close-up view of the whole mural, find the poster on the second floor. It’s to the right as you descend the stairs from the reading room overlook.

This takes us to the end of our tour together, but please continue to explore! Visit the exhibitions to see examples from the Library’s collections. If you have any questions or would like any additional information, please ask any of the volunteers and staff you meet here. They’ll be happy to share more stories from the Library of Congress, America’s National Library, and your library too.