between 1888 and 1894
1800–1851: Origin and Jefferson's contribution In 1783,
James Madison, a
Founding Father and the nation's fourth president, proposed creating a congressional library, but failed to gain necessary support for the idea. After the
American Revolutionary War, however, the Philadelphia Library Company and
New York Society Library served as surrogate congressional libraries when Congress convened in those cities. On April 24, 1800, the Library of Congress was established when
John Adams, the nation's second president, signed an
act of Congress, which appropriated $5,000 "for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress...and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them." Books were ordered from London, forming a collection of 740 books and three maps housed in the new
United States Capitol. Adams' successor as U.S. president,
Thomas Jefferson, also played a crucial role in shaping development of the Library of Congress. On January 26, 1802, Jefferson signed a bill allowing the president to appoint the
librarian of Congress and establishing a
Joint Committee on the Library to oversee it. The law also extended borrowing privileges to the president and vice president. In August 1814, British forces occupied Washington and, in retaliation for American acts of destruction in Canada,
burned several
federal government buildings. Among the buildings burnt was the Library of Congress, which saw over 3,000 of its volumes destroyed. The volume was taken by British Admiral
George Cockburn as a souvenir, and was later returned to the U.S. in 1940 by his family. Within a month, Jefferson offered to sell his large personal library as a replacement. He had reconstituted his own collection after losing part of it to a fire. Congress accepted the offer in January 1815, appropriating $23,950 to purchase his 6,487 books. Jefferson's collection, gathered over 50 years, covered various subjects and languages, including topics not typically found in a legislative library. He organized his books based on
Francis Bacon's
organization of knowledge, grouping them into Memory, Reason, and Imagination with 44 subdivisions. The library used this scheme until the late 19th century when librarian
Herbert Putnam introduced the
Library of Congress Classification, now applying to over 138 million items. A February 24, 1824, report from the
Committee of Ways and Means recommended a $5,000 appropriation for the Library of Congress, noting the need to improve its collections in "Law, Politics, Commerce, History, and Geography," which were crucial for Congress.
1851–1865: Weakening in 1853 On December 24, 1851, the largest fire in the library's history destroyed 35,000 books, two-thirds of the library's collection, and two-thirds of
Thomas Jefferson's original transfer. Congress appropriated $168,700 to replace the lost books in 1852 but not to acquire new materials. (By 2008, the librarians of Congress had found replacements for all but 300 of the works that had been documented as being in Jefferson's original collection.) This marked the start of a conservative period in the library's administration by librarian
John Silva Meehan and joint committee chairman
James A. Pearce, who restricted the library's activities. In 1859, Congress transferred the library's public document distribution activities to the
Department of the Interior and its international book exchange program to the
Department of State. During the 1850s,
Smithsonian Institution librarian
Charles Coffin Jewett aggressively tried to develop the Smithsonian as the United States national library. His efforts were rejected by Smithsonian secretary
Joseph Henry, who advocated a focus on scientific research and publication. To reinforce his intentions for the Smithsonian, Henry established laboratories, developed a robust physical sciences library, and started the
Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, the first of many publications intended to disseminate research results. For Henry, the Library of Congress was the obvious choice as the national library. Unable to resolve the conflict, Henry dismissed Jewett in July 1854. In 1865, the Smithsonian building, also called the Castle due to its Norman architectural style, was severely damaged by fire. This incident presented Henry with an opportunity related to the Smithsonian's non-scientific library. Around this time, the Library of Congress was planning to build and relocate to the new
Thomas Jefferson Building, designed to be fireproof. Authorized by an act of Congress, Henry transferred the Smithsonian's non-scientific library of 40,000 volumes to the Library of Congress in 1866. In 1861, President
Abraham Lincoln appointed
John G. Stephenson as
Librarian of Congress; the appointment is regarded as the most political to date. Stephenson was a physician and spent equal time serving as librarian and as a physician in the
Union Army. He could manage this division of interest because he hired
Ainsworth Rand Spofford as his assistant. He was aided by expansion of the federal government after the war and a favorable political climate. He began comprehensively collecting
Americana and
American literature, led the construction of a new building to house the library, and transformed the librarian of Congress position into one of strength and independence. Between 1865 and 1870, Congress appropriated funds for the construction of the
Thomas Jefferson Building, placed all
copyright registration and
deposit activities under the library's control, and restored the international book exchange. The library also acquired the vast libraries of the Smithsonian and of historian
Peter Force, strengthening its scientific and Americana collections significantly. By 1876, the Library of Congress had 300,000 volumes; it was tied with the
Boston Public Library as the nation's largest library. It moved from the Capitol building to its new headquarters in 1897 with more than 840,000 volumes, 40 percent of which had been acquired through copyright deposit. testified that the library should continue its expansion to become a true national library. Based on the hearings, Congress authorized a budget that allowed the library to more than double its staff, from 42 to 108 persons. Senators
Justin Morrill of Vermont and
Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana were particularly helpful in gaining this support. The library also established new administrative units for all aspects of the collection. In its bill, Congress strengthened the role of librarian of Congress: it became responsible for governing the library and making staff appointments. As with presidential Cabinet appointments, the Senate was required to approve presidential appointees to the position.
1897–1939: Post-reorganization of the five-year old Library of Congress in its new building that was renamed the
Thomas Jefferson Building in 1980 in honor of
Thomas Jefferson , built 1890–1897, the Library of Congress's main building, on
Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., showing West side colonnade of Jefferson Building, viewed from across First Street and the grounds of the East Front of the
U.S. Capitol With this support and the 1897 reorganization upon moving into its new home, the Library of Congress began to grow and develop more rapidly. Librarian Spofford's successor
John Russell Young overhauled the library's bureaucracy, used his connections as a former diplomat to acquire more materials from around the world, and established the library's first assistance programs for the blind and physically disabled, with the establishment of the
National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled. Librarian Young's successor
Herbert Putnam held the office for forty years of the 20th century from 1899 to 1939. Two years after he took office, the library became the first in the United States to hold one million volumes. Putnam also expanded library access to "scientific investigators and duly qualified individuals", and began publishing
primary sources for the benefit of scholars. on display at the Library of Congress Putnam established the
Legislative Reference Service (LRS) in 1914 as a separative administrative unit of the library. Based on the
Progressive Era's philosophy of science to be used to solve problems, and modeled after successful research branches of state legislatures, the LRS would provide informed answers to Congressional research inquiries on almost any topic. Congress passed in 1925 an act allowing the Library of Congress to establish a trust fund board to accept donations and endowments, giving the library a role as a
patron of the arts. The library received donations and endowments by such prominent wealthy individuals as
John D. Rockefeller, James B. Wilbur, and
Archer M. Huntington. Gertrude Clarke Whittall donated five
Stradivarius violins to the library.
Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge's donations paid for a
concert hall to be constructed within the Library of Congress building and an
honorarium established for the Music Division to pay live performers for concerts. A number of chairs and consultantships were established from the donations, the most well-known of which is the
Poet Laureate Consultant. After Mumford retired in 1974, President
Gerald Ford appointed historian
Daniel J. Boorstin as a librarian. Boorstin's first challenge was to manage the relocation of some sections to the new Madison Building, which took place between 1980 and 1982. With this accomplished, Boorstin focused on other areas of library administration, such as acquisitions and collections. Taking advantage of steady budgetary growth, from $116 million in 1975 to over $250 million by 1987, Boorstin enhanced institutional and staff ties with scholars, authors, publishers, cultural leaders, and the business community. His activities changed the post of librarian of Congress so that by the time he retired in 1987,
The New York Times called this office "perhaps the leading intellectual public position in the nation."
1987–2015: Billington leadership, digitization and programs In 1987, President
Ronald Reagan nominated historian
James H. Billington as the thirteenth librarian of Congress, and the
U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed the appointment. Under Billington's leadership, the library doubled the size of its analog collections from 85.5 million items in 1987 to more than 160 million items in 2014. At the same time, it established new programs and employed new technologies to "get the champagne out of the bottle". These included: •
American Memory created in 1990, which became the
National Digital Library in 1994. It provides free access online to digitized American history and culture resources, including
primary sources, with curatorial explanations to support use in
K-12 education. •
THOMAS.gov website launched in 1994 to provide free public access to U.S. federal legislative information with ongoing updates; and
Congress.gov website to provide a state-of-the-art framework for both Congress and the public in 2012; •
National Book Festival, founded in 2001 with First Lady
Laura Bush, has attracted more than 1,000 authors and a million guests to the
National Mall and the
Washington Convention Center to celebrate reading. With a major gift from
David Rubenstein in 2013, the library established the
Library of Congress Literacy Awards to recognize and support achievements in improving literacy in the U.S. and abroad; •
Kluge Center, started with a grant of $60 million from
John W. Kluge in 2000, brings international scholars and researchers to use library resources and to interact with policymakers and the public. It hosts public lectures and scholarly events, provides endowed Kluge fellowships, and awards the
Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity (now worth $1.5 million), the first Nobel-level international prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences (subjects not included in the
Nobel awards); •
Open World Leadership Center, established in 2000; by 2015 this program administered 23,000 professional exchanges for emerging post-Soviet leaders in Russia, Ukraine, and other successor states of the former
USSR. Open World began as a Library of Congress project, and later was established as an independent agency in the legislative branch. •
Veterans History Project, congressionally mandated in 2000 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans from
World War I to the present day; •
National Audio-Visual Conservation Center opened in 2007 at a 45-acre site in
Culpeper, Virginia, established with a gift of more than $150 million by the
Packard Humanities Institute, and $82.1 million in additional support from Congress. in the library's main building Since 1988, the library has administered the
National Film Preservation Board. Established by congressional mandate, it selects twenty-five American films annually for preservation and inclusion in the
National Film Registry, a collection of American films, for which the Library of Congress accepts nominations each year. There also exists a
National Recording Registry administered by the
National Recording Preservation Board that serves a similar purpose for music and sound recordings. The library has made some of these available on the Internet for free streaming and additionally has provided brief essays on the films that have been added to the registry. By 2015, the librarian had named 650 films to the registry. The films in the collection date from the earliest period to ones produced more than ten years ago; they are selected from nominations submitted to the board. Further programs included: •
Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, was launched in 2007 to honor the work of an artist whose career reflects lifetime achievement in song composition. Winners have included
Paul Simon,
Stevie Wonder,
Paul McCartney,
Burt Bacharach and
Hal David,
Carole King,
Billy Joel, and
Willie Nelson, as of 2015. The library also launched the
Living Legend Awards in 2000 to honor artists, activists, filmmakers, and others who have contributed to America's diverse cultural, scientific, and social heritage; • Fiction Prize (now the
Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction) was started in 2008 to recognize distinguished lifetime achievement in the writing of fiction. •
World Digital Library, established in association with
UNESCO and 181 partners in 81 countries in 2009, makes copies of professionally curated primary materials of the world's varied cultures freely available online in multiple languages. • National Jukebox, launched in 2011, provides streaming free online access to more than 10,000 out-of-print music and spoken-word recordings. • BARD was started in 2013; it is a digital, talking books
mobile app for
braille and audio reading downloads, in partnership with the library's
National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled. It enables free downloads of audio and braille books to mobile devices via the
Apple App Store. During Billington's tenure, the library acquired
General Lafayette's papers in 1996 from a castle at La Grange, France; they had previously been inaccessible. It also acquired the only copy of the 1507
Waldseemüller world map ("America's birth certificate") in 2003; it is on permanent display in the library's Thomas Jefferson Building. Using privately raised funds, the Library of Congress has created a reconstruction of Thomas Jefferson's original library. This has been on permanent display in the Jefferson building since 2008. of Peace'',
mosaic by
Elihu Vedder in the library's main building|right Under Billington, public spaces of the Jefferson Building were enlarged and technologically enhanced to serve as a national exhibition venue. It has hosted more than 100 exhibitions. These included exhibits on the
Vatican Library and the , several on the Civil War and Lincoln, on African-American culture, on Religion and the founding of the American Republic, the Early Americas (the Kislak Collection became a permanent display), on the global celebration commemorating the 800th anniversary of
Magna Carta, and on early American printing, featuring the Rubenstein
Bay Psalm Book. Onsite access to the Library of Congress has been increased. Billington gained an underground connection between the new U.S. Capitol Visitors Center and the library in 2008 to increase both congressional usage and public tours of the library's Thomas Jefferson Building. where a collection of storage modules have preserved and made accessible more than 4 million items from the library's analog collections. Billington established the Library Collections Security Oversight Committee in 1992 to improve protection of the collections, and also the Library of Congress Congressional Caucus in 2008 to draw attention to the library's curators and collections. He created the library's first Young Readers Center in the Jefferson Building in 2009, and the first large-scale summer intern (Junior Fellows) program for university students in 1991. Under Billington, the library sponsored the Gateway to Knowledge in 2010 to 2011, a mobile exhibition to ninety sites, covering all states east of the Mississippi, in a specially designed eighteen-wheel truck. This increased public access to library collections off-site, particularly for rural populations, and helped raise awareness of what was also available online. Billington raised more than half a billion dollars of private support to supplement Congressional appropriations for library collections, programs, and digital outreach. These private funds helped the library to continue its growth and outreach in the face of a 30% decrease in staffing, caused mainly by legislative appropriations cutbacks. He created the library's first development office for private fundraising in 1987. In 1990, he established the James Madison Council, the library's first national private sector donor-support group. In 1987, Billington also asked the
Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct the first library-wide audit. He created the first
Office of the Inspector General at the library to provide regular, independent reviews of library operations. This precedent has resulted in regular annual financial audits at the library; it has received unmodified ("clean") opinions from 1995 onward. , the Twitter archive remains unfinished. Before retiring in 2015, after 28 years of service, Billington had come "under pressure" as librarian of Congress. This followed a GAO report that described a "work environment lacking central oversight" and faulted Billington for "ignoring repeated calls to hire a chief information officer, as required by law." When Billington announced his plans to retire in 2015, commentator
George Weigel described the Library of Congress as "one of the last refuges in Washington of serious bipartisanship and calm, considered conversation", and "one of the world's greatest cultural centers".
2016–2025: Hayden leadership Appointed in 2016 by President
Barack Obama,
Carla D. Hayden was sworn in as the fourteenth librarian of Congress on September 14, 2016. She is the first professional librarian to hold the post since 1974, holding a Ph.D. in
library science from the
University of Chicago. She was the
CEO of
Enoch Pratt Free Library in
Baltimore, Maryland, from 1993 until 2016, and president of the
American Library Association (ALA) from 2003 to 2004. She also is the first woman and the first African American to hold the position. She continued the work of digitizing as much as possible of the collection and of expanding electronic access to the collection. She initiated programs to modernize the library, expand access from rural areas, and expanding the infrastructure and technological capacity of the library and assessment of her leadership of the library by the community reflects her expressed goals. The
Association of Research Libraries noted Hayden's transformation of the library "into a more open, accessible, and celebrated U.S. institution, while reaffirming its role as the people’s library". The
American Library Association characterized Hayden as a "wise and faithful steward of the Library of Congress – the library she has called our 'national treasure'". participating in the June 2017 "Library of Awesome" event at the United States Library of Congress that celebrated the role of comics and graphic novels in promoting literacy, as they strike the typical pose of
Wonder Woman In 2017, Hayden announced the Librarian-in-Residence program, which aims to support the future generation of librarians by giving them the opportunity to gain work experience in five different areas of librarianship, including: Acquisitions/Collection Development, Cataloging/Metadata, and Collection Preservation. On January 6, 2021, at 1:11 pm EST, the Library's
Madison Building and the
Cannon House Office Building were the first buildings in the Capitol Complex to be ordered to evacuate as rioters breached security perimeters before
storming the Capitol building. Hayden clarified two days later that rioters did not breach any of the Library buildings or collections and all staff members were safely evacuated. On February 14, 2023, Hayden announced that the
Lilly Endowment gifted the library with $2.5 million as a five-year grant to "launch programs that foster greater understanding of religious cultures in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East". The Library plans to leverage the donation in these areas: • Produce a book and a film about
Omar ibn Said • Provide public access to "programs that enhance knowledge about faiths practiced in the regions, including Indigenous African religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and their influence on daily life." via email and without any explanation, she was abruptly fired by
President Trump. ''
Publishers' Weekly'' characterized Hayden's termination as the "latest blow to professional research and the literary and arts community." No replacement of Hayden has been nominated. Principal Deputy Librarian
Robert Newlen, who would have served as interim librarian was fired and Trump named Deputy Attorney General
Todd Blanche as acting librarian of Congress and later fired the deputy librarian and copyright office director (Perlmutter and Newlen), appointing senior DOJ officials Brian Nieves and Paul Perkins as respectively, for the interim. This has been interpreted as an attack on the separation of powers. Perlmutter has sued to dispute the legality of the dismissal, as the register is appointed by, and responsible to, the
librarian of Congress. == Holdings ==