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General Information

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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.

An agency of the legislative branch of the U.S. government, the Library includes several internal divisions (or service units), including the Office of the Librarian, Congressional Research Service, U.S. Copyright Office, Law Library of Congress, Library Services, and National and International Outreach. You can download a PDF of the Library's organizational chart. Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view this document.

The Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave, SE
Washington, DC 20540

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Collections

Today's Library of Congress is an unparalleled world resource. The collection of more than 162 million items includes more than 38.6 million cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 70 million 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.

More about the Library's Collections

Year 2016 at a Glance

In fiscal year 2016 (October 2015 to September 2016), the Library of Congress ...

Responded to more than 1 million reference requests from Congress, the public and other federal agencies and delivered approximately 18,380 volumes from the Library’s collections to congressional offices

Registered 414,269 claims to copyright through its U.S. Copyright Office

Circulated nearly 22 million copies of Braille and recorded books and magazines to more than 800,000 blind and physically handicapped reader accounts

Circulated more than 997,000 items for use inside and outside the Library

Preserved more than 10.5 million items from the Library's collections

Recorded a total of 164,403,119 items in the collections:

  • 24,189,688 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
  • 14,660,079 items in the nonclassified print collections, including books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports, and other printed material
  • 125,553,352 items in the nonclassified (special) collections, including:
    • 3,670,573 audio materials, (discs, tapes, talking books, other recorded formats)
    • 70,685,319 manuscripts
    • 5,581,756 maps
    • 17,153,167 microforms
    • 1,809,351 moving images
    • 8,189,340 items of sheet music
    • 15,071,355 visual materials including:
      • 14,290,385 photographs
      • 107,825 posters
      • 673,145 prints and drawings
    • 3,392,491 other items, (including machine-readable items)

Welcomed nearly 1.8 million onsite visitors and recorded 92.8 million visits and more than 454 million page views on the Library's web properties

Employed 3,149 permanent staff members

Operated with a total fiscal 2016 appropriation of $642.04 million, including the authority to spend $42.13 million in receipts

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