Humble Beginnings.
It was on this day, in 1815, that the U.S. Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's personal library of 6,487 books. These books became the core for the reestablished Library of Congress. The library was originally founded in 1800, but in 1814 it's 3000 volumes were destroyed when the Capitol was burned by the British.
Today the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. The Library's web site tell us that it houses:
more than 120 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 18 million books, 2.5 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.5 million maps, and 54 million manuscripts.
I suppose that today, when on Google's main page we read that the search engine searches 2,073,418,204 web pages (as of this writing), those "120 million items" don't seem quite that impressive, but once we remember that we're dealing with cataloged and quality items, we have to admit that there's nothing like a good library, and the LOC certainly is a good one.
So happy birthday to the largest library in the world. May you continue to grow. And grow it does. The web site reports that:
The Library receives some 22,000 items each working day and adds approximately 10,000 items to the collections daily.
Although this may like wonderful growth, numerous sources report that it brings with it major problems, not the least of which is space: Where do you put all these new items! But at the moment we're celebrating a birthday, so perhaps we'll leave an examination of the problems for another time.
Go to: What's a nice constructivist like you doing in a site like this?