The world's largest library

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 138 million items on approximately 650 miles of bookshelves.

• The collections include more than 32 million books and other print materials, 2.9 million recordings, 12.5 million photographs, 5.3 million maps, 5.5 million pieces of sheet music and 61 million manuscripts.
• The Library receives some 22,000 items each working day and adds approximately 10,000 items to the collections daily.
• Approximately half of the Library’s book and serial collections are in languages other than English. The collections contain materials in some 470 languages.
• The Library holds the largest rare-book collection in North America (more than 700,000 volumes), including the largest collection of 15th-century books in the Western Hemisphere.

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With a staff of nearly 3,000 and an annual appropriation of more than $300 million, the library is truly a wondrous monument.