Aerial view of the Thomas Jefferson Building, the oldest structure in the Library of Congress complex
The Library of Congress processed 150+ million items and as you will see that is only part of what they accomplished throughout a very active year. It is mind boggling!
Here is what went on at our nations oldest cultural institution in 2013:
- Responded to more than 636,000 congressional reference requests and delivered to Congress approximately 23,000 volumes from the Library’s collections;
- Registered 496,599 claims to copyright;
- Provided reference services to 513,946 individuals in person, by telephone and through written and electronic correspondence;
- Circulated more than 25 million copies of Braille and recorded books and magazines to the user accounts of more than 800,000 blind and physically handicapped readers;
- Circulated more than 1 million items for use within the Library;
- Preserved more than 5.6 million items from the Library’s collections;
- Recorded a total of 158,007,115 physical items in the collections:
- 23,592,066 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
- 13,344,477 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports and other print material
- 121,070,572 items in the nonclassified (special) collections, including:
- 3,530,036 audio materials (discs, tapes, talking books and other recorded formats)
- 68,971,722 manuscripts
- 5,507,706 maps
- 16,816,894 microforms
- 1,697,513 moving images (film, television broadcasts, DVDs)
- 6,751,212 items of sheet music
- 14,472,273 visual materials, as follows:
- 13,728,116 photographs
- 104,879 posters
- 639,278 prints and drawings
- 3,323,216 other (including machine-readable collections)
The library also welcomed more than 1.6 million onsite visitors and recorded 84 million visits and more than 519 million page-views on the Library’s web properties. At year’s end, the Library’s online primary-source files totaled 45.2 million.
Press Release: Library by the Numbers 2013 | Library of Congress.