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To find out how many books there are in the Library of Congress, we went straight to the source. As we expected, information on the Library's web site was well organized and easy to locate. We clicked first on a link to Help & FAQs, then on a link titled Fascinating Facts About the Library of Congress. Here's what we learned:
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with 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. That's a
lot of books, but it's definitely not every book ever printed, even though the Library continues to grow at the current rate of 10,000 items daily (less than half of the 22,000 items received every working day). Items that are not selected for the Library of Congress's own collections are used in national and international exchange programs, made available to other federal agencies, or donated to educational institutions and nonprofit organizations in the United States. There are other remarkable superlatives that apply to the collections of the Library of Congress. The Law Library of Congress, containing over 2.4 million volumes, is the world's largest law library. This is not surprising given that the number one priority of the Library
of Congress is to serve our lawmakers by making "knowledge and creativity available to the United States Congress," as well as to the American people, now and in future generations. You'll find the largest rare book collection in North America (with over 700,000 volumes) at the Library of Congress, including a "perfect" vellum copy of the Gutenberg Bible. The Library also boasts the world's largest collection of comic books (100,000 issues), historic telephone books and city directories, more than 4.4 million technical reports, and over a million U.S. Ph.D. dissertations (yawn!). The smallest book in the collection is Old King Cole -- "about the size of the period at the end of this sentence." But let's put things in a digital perspective. According to the Internet Archive, if you converted all the text in the Library of Congress (that's words, not pictures) into digital format, it would equal about 20 terabytes (or 20,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica). In October 2001, the Internet Archive's collection of online data contained about 10 billion web pages -- over 100 terabytes of data and growing. Of course, this includes home pages, personal pet pages, and usenet newsgroups, as well as electronic books and Ph.D. theses.
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