Detail from "Conquest of Mexico" from the Kislak collection.
During 2004 the size of the Library's collections grew to 130 million items, an increase of 2.5 million over the previous year. This figure included more than 29 million cataloged books and other print materials, 58 million manuscripts, 14 million microforms, 4.8 million maps, 5 million items in the music collection, nearly 14 million visual materials, 2.7 million audio materials and more than one million items in miscellaneous formats.
Integrated Library System. The Library of Congress Integrated Library System (LC ILS) performs routine library functions such as circulation, acquisitions and serials check-in. The LC ILS also provides access to the Library's Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). During the year, the OPAC function was upgraded to improve system accessibility. As a result, the system can accommodate 525 simultaneous users—up from 425 simultaneous users the previous year.
Arrearage Reduction/Cataloging. At year's end the arrearage in special formats was 19,034,859 items, a decrease of 46.6 percent since the Library's arrearage census of September 1989. During the year the Cataloging Directorate and Serial Record Division cataloged a total of 294,510 bibliographic volumes. Production of full- and core-level original cataloging totaled 185,309 bibliographic records. Cataloging staff also created 24,392 inventory-level records for arrearage items, 46,363 copy cataloging records and 23,872 minimal-level cataloging records.
Folklorist Alan Lomax behind the camera at a Mississippi festival in 1979. - Bill Ferris
With the Library serving as the secretariat for the international Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), member institutions created 146,645 new name authorities; 9,453 new series authorities; 2,558 subject authorities; and 71,661 bibliographic records for monographs. In addition, the Library contributed 92,311 new name authorities; 8,770 new series authorities; and 6,393 subject authorities.
Secondary storage. With support from Congress, the Library continued to fill new storage units at Fort Meade, Md. During the year nearly 568,000 items were transferred to Fort Meade, bringing the total number of items transferred to Module 1 since the program's inception to 1.2 million, or 90 percent of its capacity. Construction on Module 2 began in December 2003, with completion expected in 2005.
Planning continued for the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) in Culpeper, scheduled to begin to open in 2005. Generously funded by the Packard Humanities Institute and supported by Congress, the facility will eventually house the Library's recorded sound, videotape, safety film and nitrate film collections.
Important New Acquisitions. The Library receives millions of items each year from copyright deposits, federal agencies, and purchases, exchanges and gifts. Significant acquisitions made possible by the James Madison Council, the Library's private-sector support group, during the year included a 1762 edition of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Spanish; retrospective Iraqi publications (previously unavailable due to sanctions that prevailed for 12 years); a powder horn from the American Revolution era; a George Gershwin letter and 45 additional titles to reconstitute Thomas Jefferson's personal library. In addition, the Library's Veterans History Project received more than 80,000 items documenting the experience of the nation's veterans and their families.
The Library also acquired the following significant items and collections in 2004:
Editorial cartoonist Herbert Block (Herblock) has depicted the famous and infamous during his 70 year career.
The Jay I. Kislak Collection of rare books, manuscripts, maps and art of the early history of the Americas, including the first printed navigational chart of the world (Carta Marina), prepared by cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1516; manuscript documents by famed explorers Hernando Cortés and Francisco Pizarro; and letters by and about the founding fathers.
The Alan Lomax Collection, an unrivaled assemblage of ethnographic documentation collected by the legendary folklorist over a period of 60 years, coupled with the material acquired by his father John Lomax during his tenure at the Library's Archive of American Folk Song during the 1930s and 1940s, brings the entire collection together for the first time at the Library of Congress.
Additions to the papers of political cartoonist Herbert Block, comprising 175,000 items of the cartoonist's manuscript (non-graphic) collection of correspondence, notes, drafts of writings, photographs and other papers.
The papers of conductor-composer Isaac Stern from the Stern estate, culminating a 10-year effort to bring Stern's papers to the Library.
Two rare children's books: "ABCs of Great Negroes" by Charles C. Dawson (Chicago: Dawson Publishers, 1933) and "The Alphabet annotated for Youth and Adults…" (London: Ackermann & Co., 1853).
