The Library of Congress acquires materials in all formats--books, periodicals, maps, music, prints, photographs, recorded sound, videos, electronic, etc.--and in all subjects, except technical agriculture and clinical medicine, from all over the world. We use six methods to acquire materials--Cataloging in Publication, Copyright, Exchange, Gift, Federal Transfer, and Purchase. The collection is shaped by the Library's Collection Policy Statements and totals over 138,000,000 items.
Acquisitions Updates
International Exchange Service
In order to sustain the free flow of government information in the new publishing environment, the Library of Congress has undertaken a project to transform the International Exchange Service (IES) program. The transformation effort expects to embrace the analog and digital publishing environment; to achieve a flexibility sufficient to meet individual country needs in terms of the format of the content delivered to them; to recommend or identify tools to receive, access, archive, preserve, and deliver content “received” by the Library under the IES; and to meet the Library’s collection development needs.
