50 Fun Facts About Library of Congress

In which year was the Library of Congress founded?

It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States.

Which president signed the act of Congress that established the library on 24 April of its founding year?

It appropriated $5,000 for books and 'a suitable apartment for containing them'.

How many books made up the library's first collection, ordered from London?

There were also three maps, all housed in the new Capitol.

Which Founding Father first proposed a congressional library in 1783 but failed to win support?

The library's third building, opened in 1980, is now his official memorial.

Who destroyed much of the original collection in August 1814?

More than 3,000 volumes in the Senate wing of the Capitol were lost.

What single volume did Admiral Cockburn take from the 1814 fire, returned by his family in 1940?

It had sat in British hands for 126 years.

How many books did Congress buy from Thomas Jefferson in 1815 to rebuild the library?

The price was $23,950; the purchase doubled the library's size and broadened it beyond legislative subjects.

Which New Hampshire congressman opposed buying Jefferson's library over books of 'atheistical, irreligious' tendency?

Jefferson replied that there was no subject a member of Congress might not need to consult.

Jefferson organised his books into Memory, Reason and Imagination, following whose scheme of knowledge?

The library used his 44 subdivisions until a later librarian introduced the Library of Congress Classification.

On which date did the largest fire in the library's history destroy 35,000 books?

It took two-thirds of the collection, including two-thirds of Jefferson's books; replacements for all but 300 had been found by 2008.

Whose librarian, Charles Coffin Jewett, tried in the 1850s to make his employer the national library?

Secretary Joseph Henry sacked him and later transferred 40,000 non-scientific volumes to the Library of Congress in 1866.

Which Lincoln-appointed librarian of Congress spent much of his term as an army physician at Gettysburg?

His most important act may have been hiring Spofford as his assistant to run the place.

Which librarian, in office from 1865 for more than three decades, built the library into a national institution and won it copyright deposit?

By the time it moved out of the Capitol the library held more than 840,000 volumes, 40 percent of them from copyright deposit.

In which year did the library gain the right to two copies of every copyrightable work printed in the US?

Thousands of new items now arrive every business day, though not all are kept.

In 1876 the Library of Congress was tied as the nation's largest with which city's public library?

Both held about 300,000 volumes at the time.

In which year did the library move out of the Capitol into what is now the Thomas Jefferson Building?

Construction had begun in 1890 with granite from New England Granite Works.

Who was the first woman appointed to the library's staff, in 1893?

The reorganisation on moving into the new building then more than doubled the staff from 42 to 108.

Which librarian held the post for forty years from 1899 and introduced the interlibrary loan service?

He called the Library of Congress a 'library of last resort' and devised its classification system.

In which year did the Library of Congress become the first US library to hold one million volumes?

That was two years into a forty-year tenure.

Which president transferred the Founding Fathers' papers from the State Department to the library in 1903?

Putnam also bought an 80,000-volume Russian library and the Romanovs' imperial collection.

The Otto Vollbehr collection, bought in 1929, included one of three perfect vellum copies of what?

The library's copy came from the Saint Blaise Abbey in the Black Forest.

How many Stradivarius violins did Gertrude Clarke Whittall donate to the library?

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge paid for a concert hall inside the building.

Founded in 1914 to answer lawmakers' questions, what is the library's policy-analysis arm for Congress called?

The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 refocused the library on research for Congress.

Which poet, appointed by FDR, became the most widely known Librarian of Congress?

He set up a 'democracy alcove' for the Declaration and Constitution and resigned in 1944 to become Assistant Secretary of State.

Where were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution stored during World War II?

The library also researched Himalayan weather data for Air Force pilots.

Which librarian's postwar 'Library of Congress Missions' helped create Japan's National Diet Library?

Another mission assisted the San Francisco meeting that founded the United Nations.

Which librarian called a proposal to rename the Library of Congress 'unspeakable violence to tradition'?

Harvard's Douglas Bryant had suggested emphasising the library's national over its legislative role.

Which historian, appointed by Gerald Ford in 1974, oversaw the move into the Madison Building?

By his retirement in 1987 the New York Times called the post 'perhaps the leading intellectual public position in the nation'.

Which Reagan-nominated Librarian of Congress doubled the collections to 160 million items?

He launched digitisation, the online legislative archive, the National Book Festival and the Kluge Center.

What was the name of the library's first digitisation project, launched in 1990?

It was first meant to distribute 160 million objects on LaserDiscs and CDs before the internet changed the plan.

The THOMAS archive of congressional proceedings was replaced from 2012 by which website?

It is a joint project of the library, the House, the Senate and the Government Publishing Office; THOMAS was retired in 2016.

With which First Lady did the library found the National Book Festival in 2001?

It has since drawn more than 1,000 authors and a million visitors.

The $1.5 million Kluge Prize honours lifetime achievement in fields not covered by what?

John W. Kluge's $60 million grant in 2000 also funds fellowships and public lectures.

Carla Hayden, sworn in as librarian of Congress in 2016, was the first what in the post?

She was also the first professional librarian in the job since 1974, having run Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Which president appointed Carla Hayden?

She had been president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004.

How was Carla Hayden removed from office in May 2025?

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was named acting librarian, a move critics called an attack on the separation of powers.

Approximately how many items does the Library of Congress hold?

They come in more than 470 languages and fill about 838 miles of shelving.

How many buildings does the library occupy on Capitol Hill?

They are named for Jefferson, Adams and Madison and linked by underground passages.

In which year did the library's second building, originally called the Annex, open to the public?

It initially housed the Copyright Office, which moved to the Madison Building in the 1970s.

The Madison Building houses the Copyright Office and a film reading room named after which actress?

The theatre hosts regular free screenings of classic and contemporary films.

The library's National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, in a former Cold War bunker, is in which Virginia town?

It is named for David Woodley Packard and centres on a reproduction Art Deco cinema.

Who is allowed to borrow materials for use outside the building?

The library is otherwise open to the public for on-site research.

Under mandatory deposit, roughly how many new US items reach the library daily?

About 12,000 a day are kept; the rest are traded, given to agencies or donated.

How many miles of bookshelves does the library say its collection fills?

A 2000 study estimated the text of its then 26 million books at 10 terabytes.

Which library staffer developed MARC, the international standard format for machine-readable cataloguing?

John Y. Cole founded the Center for the Book and was the library's first historian.

How often must the librarian of Congress rule on exemptions to DMCA Section 1201?

The register of copyrights collects public proposals and advises the librarian.

Which case found mandatory deposit of published works at the library violated the Takings Clause?

Publishers are otherwise required to send two copies of every published work.

In the US, which kind of institution mainly uses the Library of Congress Classification?

It now applies to more than 138 million items.

In 2003 the library acquired the only copy of a 1507 world map often called 'America's birth certificate'. Whose map?

It is on permanent display in the Thomas Jefferson Building.

How many American films does the library select each year for the National Film Registry?

A parallel National Recording Registry preserves music and sound recordings.