Finding Aids to Archival Collections

The American Folklife Center (AFC) documents and shares the many expressions of human experience, including music, dance, foodways, storytelling, and more, to inspire, revitalize, and perpetuate living cultural traditions. Designated by the U.S. Congress as the national center for folklife documentation and research, the Center meets its mission by stewarding archival collections, creating public programs, and exchanging knowledge and expertise. The Center's vision is to encourage diversity of expression and foster community participation in the collective creation of cultural memory.

Located on the first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, the Asian Reading Room is where the public and scholars alike may freely access more than 4 million physical items that make up the Asian collections housed at the Library of Congress. These materials encompass approximately 200 languages and dialects from across Asia, including Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Thai, Tibetan, Urdu, Vietnamese, and many others. In the Asian Reading Room, users can browse an encyclopedic, multilingual reference collection while making use of the vast and diverse collections of printed materials, rare books, and microform kept onsite and stored in remote facilities. Users will be greeted by knowledgeable and friendly reference librarians ready to assist with their research questions and general learning about the countries and peoples of East, South, and Southeast Asia while also directing them to Asian materials in other parts of the Library.

The European Reading Room should be the starting point for readers and researchers whose interest relates to European countries, including the Russian-speaking areas of Asia, but excluding Spain, Portugal, and the British Isles.

The European Reading Room is staffed by multilingual reference specialists who can direct patrons to the materials they need and answer reference questions related to the Library of Congress European collections. In the European Reading Room, patrons may consult a sizable print reference collection, access the catalog of the Library of Congress, and have books and bound periodicals from the general collections delivered for their use to in the Reading Room. The Reading Room provides access to current, unbound Slavic and Baltic periodicals newspapers and Slavic and Baltic newspapers on microfilm as well as select collections of ephemera and microfilm. Reading Room staff members are able to assist patrons with the use of digitized and digital onsite-only materials available through Library systems, ranging from newspapers and books to restricted-access web archives.

The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress provides cartographic and geographic information for all parts of the world: to Congress, federal agencies, state and local governments, the scholarly community, and the general public. Experienced staff of reference librarians, senior specialists, and technicians link researchers to the largest and most comprehensive cartographic collection in the world. Staff provide onsite reference and scanning services in the map and atlas reading room, support geospatical inquiries from Congress, and provide online answers to offsite reference questions.

The Hispanic Reading Room is an important access point at the Library of Congress for researchers working on the Caribbean, Latin America, Spain and Portugal; the indigenous cultures of those areas; and peoples throughout the world historically influenced by Luso-Hispanic heritage, including the Latina/o/e/x community in the United States.

The Library of Congress Archives are the collected records of the Library of Congress that are administered by the Manuscript Division. Beginning in 1897, with the establishment of a separate department for manuscript materials, letterbooks, borrowing ledgers, and other documentary material from offices throughout the Library have been transferred to and made available in the Manuscript Division's reading room.

The archives also include papers donated by Library of Congress staff members. In a few cases, the Manuscript Division has purchased material for retention in the archives. The archives include eighty-three individual groups or series of records that document the activities, staff, and collections of the Library of Congress.

The Manuscript Division seeks to acquire, preserve, and make available for research use personal papers and organizational records documenting the scope and diversity of the American experience.

With more than twelve thousand collections and nearly eighty million items, the collections touch upon nearly every aspect of American history and culture. The Manuscript Division's holdings are strongest in American national government, federal judiciary, diplomacy, military history, American literature, women's history, Black history, history of science, and history of the Library of Congress.

The Moving Image Research Center provides access and information services to an international community of film and television professionals, archivists, scholars, and researchers. The Library of Congress began collecting motion pictures in 1893 when Thomas Edison and his brilliant assistant W.K.L. Dickson deposited the Edison Kinetoscopic Records for copyright. However, because of the difficulty of safely storing the flammable nitrate film used at the time, the Library retained only the descriptive material relating to motion pictures. In 1942, recognizing the importance of motion pictures and the need to preserve them as a historical record, the Library began collecting the films themselves; from 1949 on these also included films made for television. Today the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) holds approximately 1.9 million items and is responsible for the acquisition, cataloging and preservation of the Library's motion picture and television collections.

The Performing Arts Reading Room is the access point for the vast and diverse collections in the custody of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Numbering over 30 million items and spanning more than 1000 years of Western music history and practice, these holdings include the classified music and book collections, music and literary manuscripts, iconography, microforms, periodicals, musical instruments, published and unpublished copyright deposits, and over 700 special collections in music, theater, and dance.

The Prints & Photographs Reading Room is the access point to many of the Library’s visual collections. Some collections are online and others await your in-person visit. Unique in their scope and richness, the picture collections number more than 17 million images. These include photographs, historical prints, posters, cartoons, documentary drawings, fine prints, and architectural and engineering designs. While international in scope, the collections are particularly strong in materials documenting the history of the United States and the lives, interests, and achievements of the American people.

The unique materials of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, now totaling nearly 1 million items, include books, broadsides, pamphlets, theater playbills, prints, posters, photographs, modern and contemporary artists' books, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, and much more. At the center is Thomas Jefferson's book collection, which was sold to Congress in 1815.

The Recorded Sound Research Center provides access to the commercial and archival audio holdings of the Library of Congress. The Library's audio collections are now the largest in the United States and among the most comprehensive in the world. The collection dates from 1926 when Victor Records donated over 400 discs to the Library's Music Division to supplement its print and manuscript holdings. In the custody of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center since 1978, the collection has grown to include nearly 4 million items encompassing audio formats from cylinders to CDs.

The Science Section within the Science and Business Reading Room, maintains, services, and develops its own specialized collections of over 5 million technical reports, standards and other archival collections on microformats, digital media, and paper. These collections grew out of the need for scientific and technical literature following WWII as well as to support the fields of aeronautics and astronautics.

The Veterans History Project (VHP) in the American Folklife Center collects and makes accessible the unique firsthand narratives of veterans who served in the US Armed Services from World War I through the present, so that we and future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand what they saw, did and felt during their service. It was founded through legislation passed by unanimous consent in both the House and Senate and became Public Law 106-380, October 27, 2000.