April 24, 1800 – President John Adams Approves Legislation to Fund a Library for Congress

On this day in history, President Adams approved the appropriation of $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.”

The Library of Congress today

The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and consisted of 740 volumes and three maps.

On January 26, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson approved a law creating a Librarian of Congress and defining the Library’s role and functions. The 1802 law also permitted the president and vice president to borrow books.

In 1814, the British army burned the Capitol building, including the Library of Congress, which by then had grown to 3,000 volumes. Jefferson, now retired and looking for extra cash, offered to sell his own personal library of 6,487 volumes to Congress for $23,940.

In 1851, a fire destroyed two-thirds of the Library’s collection, including two-thirds of Jefferson’s books. Congress appropriated money to restore the Library and replace the books, but no extra funds were allocated for supplementation.

Ainsworth Spofford

Ainsworth Spofford, who served from Librarian of Congress from 1865 to 1897, is credited with reorganizing and revitalizing the Library. Among other achievements, he worked to move all U.S. copyright activity to the library. Copyright deposits were used for collection development.

By 1897, when the Library moved across from the Capitol to a spacious new building, it had some 840,000 volumes as well as map, music, and graphic arts collections.

The magnificent main reading room of the Library of Congress

The LOC is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. The Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people, and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.

As you can discover from the LOC’s website “Fascinating Facts,” the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world with more than 170 million items. These include more than 40 million books and other printed materials, almost 15 million photographs, 5.6 million maps, 8.1 million pieces of sheet music, 1.8 million moving images, and much more.

Each working day the Library receives some 15,000 items and adds more than 10,000 items to its collections. The library can digitize about 600 books in 30 minutes.

Approximately half of the Library’s book and serial collections are in languages other than English. The collections contain materials in some 470 languages.

(There are many more “fascinating facts” which are indeed fascinating.)

You can learn more about the Library and its history here.

Inside the Library of Congress