Library of Congress Resources

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. Library of Congress collections include more than 134 million items on approximately 532 miles of bookshelves. Over 50% of the collections are in foreign languages and 60% are of foreign origin:

• 20 public reading rooms and information centers
• more than 20 million cataloged books
• more than 2.8 million audio materials (discs, tapes, talking books, and other recorded formats)
• more than 14 million visual materials (moving images, photographs, posters, prints, and drawings)
• more than 4.8 million maps
• 6 million technical reports, standards, and gray information
• 70,000 current periodical titles received annually
• more than 250 electronic databases (economics, humaities, law, social science)

"There is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress
may not have occasion to refer.”
(Thomas Jefferson, 1815)