Library of Congress
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
WASHINGTON, D. C. braries, of which that of Cordova con- have been Metastasio, Calzabigi, and tained 250,000 volumes. In Britain and Italy libraries were also founded with great zeal, particularly in the former country, by Richard Aungerville; in the latter by Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others. After the invention of the art of printing this was done more easily and at less expense. The principal libraries of modern times are the national library at Paris, with nearly 2,300,000 books and 10,000 MSS., and the British Museum over 1,500,000 library, London, with books and 100,000 MSS. The central court library at Munich, the imperial library at St. Petersburg, and the royal library at Berlin have each over 1,000,- 000 volumes and thousands of MSS. Other large and valuable libraries are the imperial library at Vienna; the royal libraries at Stuttgart, Dresden, and Copenhagen; the university libraries of Genoa, Prague, Göttingen, Upsala, Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin; also the libraries of Moscow, Venice, Florence, Milan, Bologna, Naples, and the Advocates', Edinburgh. The Vatican library, Rome, and the Bodleian, Oxford, are particularly valuable for rare books and MSS. The spread of education developing a taste for knowledge, has led all highly civilized nations to establish ex- Public Library systems consisting of small libraries easy of access for the people, each provided with books that are most in demand in that section of the country. The Public Library system of the United States may be said to extend to every corner of the country. By means of the Dept. of Traveling Libraries books are provided for persons living in remote country districts. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. See CON- GRESS, LIBRARY OF.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The 1921 Collier's page only points the reader onward ("See CONGRESS, LIBRARY OF"), and its survey of great collections puts the national library at Paris in front with about 2,300,000 books and the British Museum next with over 1,500,000. On those numbers the Library of Congress was still one competitor among several; today it holds roughly 180 million items in some 470 languages and is by a wide margin the largest library in the world, filling three Capitol Hill buildings — Jefferson (1897), Adams (1939) and Madison (1980) — plus a conservation campus at Culpeper, Virginia. Much of its work is now digital: millions of scanned newspapers, photographs, maps and recordings are free online, and the Library archives web pages and born-digital material that had no equivalent in 1921. In 2016 Carla Hayden became the first woman and the first African American to serve as Librarian of Congress.
Written for this edition, 2026.