Dear Friends, Fascinating Facts of Library of Congress *Origin* The Library was founded in 1800, making it the oldest federal cultural institution in* *the nation. On August 24, 1814, British troops burned the Capitol building (where the Library was housed) and destroyed the Library's core collection of 3,000 volumes. On January 30, 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950. *Statistics* The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 138 million items on approximately 650 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 32 million books and other print materials, 2.9 million recordings, 12.5 million photographs, 5.3 million maps, 5.5 million pieces of sheet music and 61 million manuscripts. *Collections* The Library receives some 22,000 items each working day and adds approximately 10,000 items to the collections daily. The majority of the collections are received through the Copyright registration process, as the Library is home to the U.S. Copyright Office. Materials are also acquired through gift, purchase, other government agencies (state, local and federal), Cataloging in Publication (a pre-publication arrangement with publishers) and exchange with libraries in the United States and abroad. Items not selected for the collections or other internal purposes are used in the Library's national and international exchange programs. Through these exchanges the Library acquires material that would not be available otherwise. The remaining items are made available to other federal agencies and are then available for donation to educational institutions, public bodies and nonprofit tax-exempt organizations in the United States. *International Collections* Since 1962, the Library of Congress has maintained offices abroad to acquire, catalog and preserve library and research materials from countries where such materials are essentially unavailable through conventional acquisitions methods. Overseas offices in New Delhi (India), Cairo (Egypt), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Jakarta (Indonesia), Nairobi (Kenya) and Islamabad (Pakistan) collectively acquire materials from more than 60 countries and acquire materials on behalf of United States libraries participating in the Cooperative Acquisitions Program. The Library is also collaborating with institutions around the globe to develop a World Digital Libraryhttp://www.worlddigitallibrary.org/ . *Languages* Approximately half of the Library's book and serial collections are in languages other than English. The collections contain materials in some 470 languages. Source:http://www.loc.gov Thanking You, Dinesh -- Dr. Dinesh K. S. Selection Grade Librarian, Nagarjuna College of Engineering & Technology, Devanahalli, Bengaluru - 562 110. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.