Buildings of the Library

 

The Library of Congress is physically housed in three buildings in Washington, D.C..

Thomas Jefferson Building

The Thomas Jefferson Building is located between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Street on First Street SE. It first opened in 1897 as the main building of the Library and is the oldest of the three buildings. Known originally as the Library of Congress Building or Main Building, it took its present name on June 13, 1980.

John Adams Building

The John Adams Building is located between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Street on 2nd Street SE. It opened in 1938 as an annex to the main building. Between April 13, 1976 and June 13, 1980, the John Adams Building was known as the Thomas Jefferson Building.

James Madison Memorial Building

The James Madison Memorial Building is located between First and Second Streets on Independence Avenue SE. It opened on May 28, 1980 as the new headquarters of the Library. The James Madison Memorial Building also serves as the official memorial to James Madison. It houses, among other materials, the Law Library of Congress.

Using the Library

Library of Congress reading room

The library is open to the general public for academic research and tourists. Only those who are issued a Reader Identification Card may enter the reading rooms and access the collection. The Reader Identification Card is available in the Madison building to persons who are at least 16 years of age upon presentation of a government issued picture identification (e.g. driver's license, state ID card or passport). However, only members of Congress, Supreme Court Justices, their staff, Library of Congress staff and certain other government officials can actually remove items from the library buildings. Members of the general public with Reader Identification Cards must use items from the library collection inside the reading rooms only; they cannot remove library items from the reading rooms or the library buildings.

Since 1902, libraries in the United States have been able to request books and other items through interlibrary loan from the Library of Congress if these items are not readily available elsewhere. Through this, the Library of Congress has served as a "library of last resort", according to former Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam.

Librarians of Congress

The Librarian of Congress is the head of the Library of Congress, appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate. They serve as the chief librarian of all the sections of the Library of Congress. One of the responsibilities of the Librarian of Congress is to appoint the U.S. Poet Laureate.

· John James Beckley (1802–1807)

· Patrick Magruder (1807–1815)

· George Watterston (1815–1829)

· John Silva Meehan (1829–1861)

· John Gould Stephenson (1861–1864)

· Ainsworth Rand Spofford (1864–1897)

· John Russell Young (1897–1899)

· Herbert Putnam (1899–1939)

· Archibald MacLeish (1939–1944)

· Luther H. Evans (1945–1953)

· Lawrence Quincy Mumford (1954–1974)

· Daniel J. Boorstin (1975–1987)

· James H. Billington (1987–present)

Annual events

· Archives Fair

· Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress

· Davidson Fellows Reception

· Founder's Day Celebration

· Gershwin Prize for Popular Song

· Judith P. Austin Memorial Lecture

· The National Book Festival

 

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ТЕКСТ 22. The British Library

The British Library (BL) is the national library of the United Kingdom. The library is one of the world's largest research libraries, holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings and much more. Its book collection is second only to the American Library of Congress. The Library's collections include around 14 million books,^[3] along with substantial additional collection of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.

As a legal deposit library, the BL receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, including all foreign books distributed in the UK. It also purchases many items which are only published outside Britain and Ireland. The British Library adds some three million items every year.

The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is located on the north side of Euston Road in St Pancras, London, between Euston railway station and St Pancras railway station.

The British Library was created in 1973 by the British Library Act 1972. Prior to this, the national library was part of the British Museum, which provided the bulk of the holdings of the new library, alongside various smaller organisations which were folded in (such as the British National Bibliography). In 1983, the Library absorbed the National Sound Archive, which holds many sound and video recordings, with over a million discs and thousands of tapes. The core of the Library's historical collections is based on a series of donations and acquisitions from the eighteenth century, known as the 'foundation collections'. These include the books and manuscripts of Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Hans Sloane, Robert Harley and King George III.

For many years its collections were dispersed in various buildings around central London, in places such as Bloomsbury (within the British Museum), Chancery Lane, and Holborn, with an interlibrary lending centre at Boston Spa, Wetherby in West Yorkshire (situated on Thorp Arch Trading Estate) and the newspaper library at Colindale, north-west London. However, since 1997 the main collection has been housed in a single new building on Euston Road next to St. Pancras railway station, although post-1800 newspapers are still held at Colindale, and the Document Supply Centre is still in Yorkshire. The Library also has a book storage depot in Woolwich, south-east London. The new library was designed specially for the purpose by the architect Colin St. John Wilson. Facing Euston Road is a large piazza that includes pieces of public art, such as large sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi (a bronze statue based on William Blake's study of Isaac Newton) and Antony Gormley. It is the largest public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the 20th century.

In the middle of the building is a four-storey glass tower containing the King's Library, with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820. In December 2009 a new storage building at Boston Spa was opened by Rosie Winterton. The new facility which cost £26million will house seven million items, stored in more than 140,000 bar-coded containers, which are retrieved by robots, from the 262 kilometres of temperature and humidity-controlled storage space.