Overseas offices in New Delhi (India), Cairo (Egypt), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Jakarta (Indonesia), Nairobi (Kenya) and Islamabad (Pakistan) collectively acquire materials from more than 60 countries and acquire materials on behalf of United States libraries participating in the Cooperative Acquisitions Program. Since 1962, the Library of Congress has maintained offices abroad to acquire, catalog and preserve library and research materials from countries where such materials are essentially unavailable through conventional acquisitions methods. The remaining items are made available to other federal agencies and are then available for donation to educational institutions, public bodies and nonprofit tax-exempt organizations in the United States. Through these exchanges the Library acquires material that would not be available otherwise. Items not selected for the collections or other internal purposes are used in the Library’s national and international exchange programs.
Materials are acquired as Copyright deposits and through gift, purchase, other government agencies (state, local and federal), Cataloging in Publication (a pre-publication arrangement with publishers) and exchange with libraries in the United States and abroad. The CollectionsĮach working day the Library receives some 15,000 items and adds more than 10,000 items to its collections. The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world with more than 173 million items.
On January 30, 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950. On August 24, 1814, British troops burned the Capitol building (where the Library was housed) and destroyed the Library's core collection of 3,000 volumes. The Library was founded in 1800, making it the oldest federal cultural institution in the nation.
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