A manual on the origin and development of WashingtonCaemmerer, H. Paul (Hans Paul)
History
A manual on the origin and development of Washington
Caemmerer, H. Paul (Hans Paul)
Washington (D.C.) -- Description and travel; Washington (D.C.) -- History
Other notable groups are 1,400,000 maps and views; 542,000 engravings
and other pictorial reproductions, including the splendid Pennell
collections; the law library (404,000 volumes). The social and
political sciences are represented by 890,500 volumes, language and
literature by 350,000, history by 420,000, and pure science by 265,500.
The most recent important development in service is the division of
aeronautics, established through a benefaction of $140,000 from the
Daniel Guggenheim Fund for Aeronautics, now supplemented by an annual
congressional appropriation.
Special facilities for serious research include some 50 individual
study rooms and (elsewhere) 125 special desks or tables. Interlibrary
loans for investigators whose work is likely to advance the boundaries
of knowledge are sent far and wide through the United States and some
abroad.
There is a service for blind readers which last year loaned 42,000
volumes in embossed type to some 3,000 readers in the United States.
Printed catalogue cards, numbering 110,000,000, prepared by the Library
for its own catalogues, are sold at cost to some 6,300 other libraries,
effecting for the subscribers prodigious savings in their cataloguing
bills but yielding a revenue to the Treasury of $328,405.
Until very recently Congress alone provided the funds to meet all the
Library’s expenses, excepting one gift of $20,000 received in 1904.
But in 1925 the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board was created by
Congress, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Librarian of Congress
being ex officio chairman and secretary of the board, respectively.
The act authorized the board to receive and invest funds for permanent
endowments, and the Librarian to receive gifts of money for immediate
disbursement. Already endowments aggregating about $2,000,000 and
gift funds of $1,415,000 for immediate expenditure have been received
and have yielded an income from 1925 to 1938 of $726,000. These new
resources add to the bibliographic apparatus and support a project
for developing an archive of American folk song. One endowment yields
$4,000 per year for the purchase of recent Hispanic literature and
employs a consultant to suggest items for purchase in this particular
field.
[Illustration: THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION]
Six consultants, men of professional rank and experience, are engaged
(without any administrative duties) in advising the maturer users of
the Library in their investigations. This unique service is to be found
nowhere else in libraries.
Notable among gifts are those of John D. Rockefeller, jr.--one of
$450,000 for the acquisition in facsimile copies of source material for
American history existing in the archives of foreign countries, and
another of $250,000 for the development of a great union catalogue of
important books in other American libraries.
The scheme of classification, covering 5,000 printed pages, has been
adopted in 80 large libraries in America and Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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