Library of Congress

The Library of Congress was set up to serve legislators and grew into the de facto national library of the United States. It began on 24 April 1800, when President John Adams signed an act granting $5,000 for books and a room to keep them in. The first order came from London: 740 books and three maps, shelved in the new Capitol.

That collection did not survive. In August 1814 British forces burned Washington, and more than 3,000 volumes were lost. Within a month Thomas Jefferson offered his own library as a replacement. Congress bought its 6,487 books in 1815, over objections to titles some members found irreligious. Jefferson held that a member of Congress might need to consult any subject at all, and the collection has stayed that broad.

Fire came back on Christmas Eve 1851 and destroyed two-thirds of the collection, including two-thirds of Jefferson’s books. Much of the recovery came through copyright. From 1870 the library received two copies of every copyrightable work printed in the country. By 1897, when it left the Capitol for its own building, now the Thomas Jefferson Building, 40 percent of its 840,000 volumes had arrived that way.

Jefferson had shelved his books by Francis Bacon’s division of knowledge into Memory, Reason and Imagination. The library kept that scheme until Herbert Putnam introduced the Library of Congress Classification, which most American research and university libraries now use. We compare it with Dewey in how a library catalogue works.

Today the collection holds more than 170 million items in three buildings on Capitol Hill. Anyone with a reader card may do research there, but nothing leaves the reading rooms. Publishers are required to deposit two copies of what they publish: nearly 15,000 items arrive each working day, and the library keeps about 12,000. Keeping that record is a national library’s job, as our guide to types of libraries explains.