Talk:Library of Congress

From Academic Kids

The Library of Congress, which you cited previously, contains a great number of otherwise unpublished books. user:Kat

Is this really true (I'm not saying it isn't, I'm just somewhat surprised -- is it common for actual books, not just unpublished manuscripts, to have their only copies in the Library of Congress? They are going to be deposited here if copyrighted, but would there really be only one or two copies of a book printed and bound?)? --Daniel C. Boyer 18:28, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yes. There were once printing houses that specialized in publishing three copies of a book, most often a Ph.D. thesis: one for the author, one for the library of the sponsoring institution, and one for the LOC. They would print the sheets, have them bound up in batches of three each of hundreds of different books at a time with blank covers, and then heat-stamp the title and author on each cover by hand. The practice may have changed with the advent of desktop publishing. Having a book bound in short runs isn't the enormous expense one might think, it's just expensive on a per-copy basis. It's been five or ten years since I last checked prices, but one of the outfits I used to write for would usually order books 25 at a time because we were constantly revising the content. They had a stock cover in color, that they ordered 10,000 at a time and never changed. It was overprinted with the title and so forth for each run, then laminated. Then the cover and sheets were bound with a wire-o, the twin-wire sort of spiral binding. I think a run of 25 ended up costing around $300 or so, and most of that was setup charges. Kat 19:18, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thank you for this very interesting information about a practice and possibility I was completely unaware of (though I'd heard of the more recent development of these outfits where you can print books on demand, a copy at a time). --Daniel C. Boyer 13:35, 12 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Where does the article mention the actual city where the library is located??

Good point - it's in Washington DC, but that's not mentioend. →Raul654 12:55, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Could one clarify what is meant by the 20 terabytes figure being "misleading" as to the total information content of the LoC? Is this because the non-print portions of the LoC would require far more data size to store? If so, is there an estimate available for what the total amount of storage needed for the entire LoC would be? Perhaps this is not a meaningful question, but nevertheless the current paragraph is a bit confusing. Terry 18:39, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

IMHO the misleading element is the presumed equivalence between a book and its contents in pure ASCII text, which is absurd on its face. Also, the Library's content includes a tremendous amount of non-book stuff, including easily 20 TB of digital data. For that matter, the Library has Stradivarius violins -- how much information content would you need for one of those? My point is that the 20 TB number is glib and ultimately without meaning, despite its being oft repeated. I'm keen to find a better way to express that thought, but what I'm trying to achieve is stopping the misleading meme that LC == 20TB. AndyBoyko 15:49, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The sentence after the 20GB information seems to be part of the argument as to why it is false, but is actually totally unrelated (as I read it?). Perhaps some more could be added to why the 20GB is a false assumption, and turned into a separate paragraph?. Wombat 05:30, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)

Pedantic nit, but ASCII has little to do with the above discussion. Ambarish 07:01, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Are texts from Library of Congress websites in public domain, so are they free to copy them to Wikipedia? example: Myrtle Hill Cemetery (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cocoon/legacies/GA/200002629.html)Darwin 14:52, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yes (generally speaking). All works authored by the U.S. Government are in the public domain, and the LoC is part of the U.S. Government. I suppose it's possible, but unlikely, that the Library of Congress would post something on its website that is copyrighted by another author (presumably with that author's permission), so it would be wise to check for any such indication before copying. -RussBlau 17:02, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

National Library (or not)

I deleted the sentence that read "The Library of Congress is one of four official national libraries of the United States (along with the National Library of Medicine, National Agricultural Library, and National Archives and Records Administration)." No source was provided for this statement. To the contrary, the LOC's own history (which is linked from this page) describes it as the "de facto national library" but stresses that it does not have that official designation. Please don't revert this unless you can provide a source for the information. RussBlau 19:01, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)