SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
EXPLORE +
  • About infoDOCKET
  • Academic Libraries on LJ
  • Research on LJ
  • News on LJ
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Libraries
    • Academic Libraries
    • Government Libraries
    • National Libraries
    • Public Libraries
  • Companies (Publishers/Vendors)
    • EBSCO
    • Elsevier
    • Ex Libris
    • Frontiers
    • Gale
    • PLOS
    • Scholastic
  • New Resources
    • Dashboards
    • Data Files
    • Digital Collections
    • Digital Preservation
    • Interactive Tools
    • Maps
    • Other
    • Podcasts
    • Productivity
  • New Research
    • Conference Presentations
    • Journal Articles
    • Lecture
    • New Issue
    • Reports
  • Topics
    • Archives & Special Collections
    • Associations & Organizations
    • Awards
    • Funding
    • Interviews
    • Jobs
    • Management & Leadership
    • News
    • Patrons & Users
    • Preservation
    • Profiles
    • Publishing
    • Roundup
    • Scholarly Communications
      • Open Access

January 24, 2014 by Gary Price

By The Numbers: The Library of Congress Releases FY2013 Statistics (Collections, Copyright, Reference, Visitors)

January 24, 2014 by Gary Price

If you enjoy library stats and facts, here’s some material that will make your day.
Here’s the Full Text of LC’s Announcement:

The Library of Congress today released statistics for fiscal year 2013. The daily business of being the world’s largest library, home of the U.S. Copyright Office and a supportive agency to the U.S. Congress resulted in the Library adding 2.65 million physical items to its permanent collections, registering more than 496,000 copyright claims and responding to 636,000 congressional reference requests in fiscal year 2013.

New Items

Some notable items newly cataloged into the Library’s collection include the papers of astronomer Carl Sagan; eight rare U.S. city plans; Pope Clement V’s Constitutiones, printed in 1476; the Bob Wolff sports broadcasting collection; the collection of Sharon Farmer, the first woman and the first African American to serve as chief White House photographer; and a list of books that Thomas Jefferson asked newspaper publisher William Duane to buy in Paris for the recently established Library of Congress.

U.S. Copyright Office

The U.S. Copyright Office registered work in fiscal year 2013 from authors in all 50 states. Grammy Award-nominated songs such as “Locked Out of Heaven,” registered in November 2012, by Bruno Mars, and such box-office toppers as “Iron Man 3,” registered in April and “Despicable Me 2,” registered in June, were among the nearly half-million novels, poems, films, software, video games, music, photographs and other works submitted.

Reference and CRS

Reference librarians and Congressional Research Service staff responded to more than 1 million reference requests from patrons both on-site and via phone and email – an average of 4,600 every business day. Students, authors and scholars sought information this year about World War I, trade data, early exploration of the Americas, household management in the ancient world, the timing of the federal fiscal year, family history and how many languages Thomas Jefferson could speak.

The Numbers

In fiscal year 2013, the Library of Congress …

  • Responded to more than 636,000 congressional reference requests and delivered to Congress approximately 23,000 volumes from the Library’s collections;
  • Registered 496,599 claims to copyright;
  • Provided reference services to 513,946 individuals in person, by telephone and through written and electronic correspondence;
  • Circulated more than 25 million copies of Braille and recorded books and magazines to the user accounts of more than 800,000 blind and physically handicapped readers;
  • Circulated more than 1 million items for use within the Library;
  • Preserved more than 5.6 million items from the Library’s collections;
  • Recorded a total of 158,007,115 physical items in the collections:
  • 23,592,066 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
  • 13,344,477 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports and other print material
  • 121,070,572 items in the nonclassified (special) collections, including:
  • 3,530,036 audio materials (discs, tapes, talking books and other recorded formats)
  • 68,971,722 manuscripts
  • 5,507,706 maps
  • 16,816,894 microforms
  • 1,697,513 moving images (film, television broadcasts, DVDs)
  • 6,751,212 items of sheet music
  • 14,472,273 visual materials, as follows:
  • 13,728,116 photographs
  • 104,879 posters
  • 639,278 prints and drawings
  • 3,323,216 other (including machine-readable collections)
  • Welcomed more than 1.6 million onsite visitors and recorded 84 million visits and more than 519 million page-views on the Library’s web properties. At year’s end, the Library’s online primary-source files totaled 45.2 million.

Filed under: Awards, Data Files, Journal Articles, Libraries, Management and Leadership, Maps, News, Patrons and Users, Publishing, Reports

SHARE:

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

Job Zone

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Infodocket Posts

LC's African and Middle Eastern Division Announces Release of the Africana Historic Postcard Collection

From The Library of Congress (via a 4 Corners of the World Blog Post by Anchi Hoh): The African and Middle Eastern Division is delighted to announce the rerelease of the ...

New From IFLA: "Marrakesh Monitoring Report - February 2023 Update"

From the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA): The chart [monitoring report]…is an updated version of previous monitoring reports. Where a country has been updated or added since ...

ROUNDUP: Research4Life Reaches 200,000 Resources; Majority of Research Papers Published by Cambridge University Press Now Open Access; &...

AI Models Spit Out Photos of Real People and Copyrighted Image (via MIT Technology Review) Developing a Globally Fair Pricing Model for Open Access Academic Publishing (via cOAlition S) Majority ...

NY Times: "Turning Nairobi’s Public Libraries Into 'Palaces for the People'"

From The NY Times: In 1931, the first library in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, opened its doors — to white patrons only. Nearly a century later, Kenyans dressed in the slinky ...

UC Berkeley School of Law Library Reclassifies Indigenous Materials, Giving Them Their Own Place on the Shelves

From Berkeley Law: As part of its broader commitment to considering and fostering diversity and inclusion within its storied stacks, the Berkeley Law Library staff have taken on one prominent example of ...

Not Real News: An Associated Press Roundup of Untrue Stories Shared Widely on Social Media This Week

From the Associated Press: A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were ...

A Selection of New or Recently Updated Reports From the Congressional Research Service

An Introduction to Trade Secrets Law in the United States Oil and Gas Technology and Geothermal Energy Development Regulating Big Tech: CRS Legal Products for the 118th Congress Rules and ...

Deepfakes are Becoming a Cottage Industry; STM US Annual Conference 2023 to Take Place in DC (April 26-27);...

Columbia: A Judge Just Used ChatGPT to Make a Court Decision (via VICE) Coming Soon: STM US Annual Conference 2023 to Take Place in DC (April 26-27) FCC Announces Over ...

New Journal Article: "Sustainability 3.0 in Libraries: A Challenge for Management"

The article linked below was published today (February 3, 2023). Title Sustainability 3.0 in Libraries: A Challenge for Management Author Alice Keller University Library Basel, University of Basel,  Switzerland Source ...

U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Nobel Foundation to Hold Nobel Prize Summit on Countering Misinformation and Building...

From a National Academies Announcement: The Nobel Prize Summit Truth, Trust and Hope will bring together Nobel Prize laureates and other world-renowned experts and leaders for a global dialogue on how to stop ...

With Support From the Arcadia Fund, MIT Press Announces New Initiative to Flip Existing Subscription-Based Journals to a...

From a MIT Press Announcement:  In keeping with its mission and longstanding commitment to increase access to scholarship, the MIT Press is pleased to announce shift+OPEN. This new initiative is designed ...

A New EPUB Reader For E-Books From the Library of Congress Open Access Books Collection 

From a Library of Congress Blog Post: The Open Access Books Collection on loc.gov includes approximately 6,000 contemporary open access e-books covering a wide range of subjects, including history, music, poetry, technology, and works ...

ADVERTISEMENT

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

Tweets by infoDOCKET

ADVERTISEMENT

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

Primary Sidebar

  • News
  • Reviews+
  • Technology
  • Programs+
  • Design
  • Leadership
  • People
  • COVID-19
  • Advocacy
  • Opinion
  • INFOdocket
  • Job Zone

Reviews+

  • Booklists
  • Prepub Alert
  • Book Pulse
  • Media
  • Readers' Advisory
  • Self-Published Books
  • Review Submissions
  • Review for LJ

Awards

  • Library of the Year
  • Librarian of the Year
  • Movers & Shakers 2022
  • Paralibrarian of the Year
  • Best Small Library
  • Marketer of the Year
  • All Awards Guidelines
  • Community Impact Prize

Resources

  • LJ Index/Star Libraries
  • Research
  • White Papers / Case Studies

Events & PD

  • Online Courses
  • In-Person Events
  • Virtual Events
  • Webcasts
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Media Inquiries
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Submit Features/News
  • Data Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Terms of Sale
  • FAQs
  • Careers at MSI


© 2023 Library Journal. All rights reserved.


© 2022 Library Journal. All rights reserved.