The Library of Congress becomes a world library, 1815-2005.

Established as a legislative library in 1800 to support the U.S. Congress when it moved from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress--retaining its original name and primary legislative purpose--has subsequently become the largest and most international of the world's major libraries. The principal reason is that Librarians of Congress since Ainsworth Rand Spofford (1864-97), but especially Herbert Putnam (1899-1939), Luther H. Evans (1945-53), and James H. Billington (1987-), have affirmed and expanded Thomas Jefferson's concept that the Library of Congress is a national institution that should be universal in scope and widely and freely available to everyone.

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Today the Library of Congress is an unparalleled world library. The scope of its collections is universal and not limited by subject, format, or national boundary. Half of its collections are in languages other than English, and approximately 460 languages are represented. The library's collections of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, music, maps, newspapers, microforms, graphic arts, and other research materials number more than 130 million items. This huge and diverse accumulation includes larger Arabic and Hispanic American collections than exist in the Arabic world or in Latin America and the largest Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Russian collections outside of those respective countries. The library also holds the nation's largest collection of serials in the languages of central Asia.

The services provided by the Library of Congress to its congressional, public, scholarly, library, and international users are based on these collections. In the twentieth century, as its collections continued to expand in scope, size, and influence, so did the library's area studies divisions and its technical services to libraries and librarians around the world. For example, in the early and middle decades of the century the library played an important and increasingly international role in the development of cataloging rules, classification schemes, subject headings, and national union catalogs. In the mid-1960s it began to develop a network of overseas acquisitions offices and to assist other libraries in collection and preservation matters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s its MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) format became the worldwide standard. In the past two years the World Wide Web has greatly increased knowledge of the library's international resources and broadened their accessibility. The library's "Global Gateway: World Culture and Resources" Web site highlights international collaborative digital projects, individual Library of Congress digital collections that focus on history and culture around the world, international links and databases, and the library's own extraordinary international collections. Today the Library of Congress is a unique reservoir of knowledge and information for understanding the entire world.

Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Origins

Thomas Jefferson's belief that a democratic legislature needed information and ideas in all subjects is the rationale for the development of the Library of Congress into a world library. After the British burned the U.S. Capitol, including the 3,000-volume Library of Congress in 1814, Jefferson suggested that Congress purchase his wide-ranging personal library to "recommence" its library, pointing out that "there is, in fact, no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer." In 1815 Congress agreed to purchase his 6,487-volume library for $23,950. Jefferson's encyclopedic interests were reflected in his library, which contained works on architecture, the arts, science, literature, and geography in addition to legal, historical, and economic works. Moreover, it included books in French, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, and one three-volume statistical work in Russian. (1)

Although the Jeffersonian concept of universality eventually became the rationale for the library's comprehensive collecting policies, it had little influence on the Library of Congress or its growth until after the Civil War. Until then, most members of Congress felt that the congressional library should play a limited role on the national scene and that its collections, by and large should emphasize American materials of obvious use to the U.S. Congress. This outlook prevailed until the administration of Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford, a nationalistic bookman who served as Librarian of Congress from 1864 to 1897.

Yet, as the official library of the national government, in the 1830s the Library of Congress began receiving government documents and other publications obtained through official exchanges with other countries. The first formal exchange took place in 1837, when the Joint Congressional Committee on the Library authorized the librarian to exchange Gales and Seaton's state papers and other documents with the French government. Between 1840 and 1852 a French citizen, Alexandre Vattemare, encouraged the exchange of documents between the Library of Congress and the French government. However, he never managed to establish a strong exchange agency in France, and the experiment eventually failed. Moreover, in 1857 Congress transferred the library's international exchange responsibility to the Department of State and its public distribution of documents function to the Bureau of the Interior.

In 1867 Spofford managed to get Congress to reverse the decision, and the library permanently became the repository of…