William Eastman, age 14, of New Bedford, Mass., for his question:
WHEN WAS THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS STARTED?
The U.S. Library of Congress, now one of the world's largest and most important libraries, was established in 1800. Congress initially appropriated $5,000 to buy books and furnish a room in the Capitol.
It was completely destroyed in 1814 when the British burned the Capitol building.
But Congress acted immediately to build up a new library. In 1815, it purchased the private library of Thomas Jefferson, which had about 6,000 books.
There was another damaging fire in 1851, but the library continued to grow and expand.
By 1897 the Library of Congress had grown so large that it could no longer be housed in the Capitol building. It then moved to a new gray sandstone building located just to the east of the Capitol.
In 1938, an annex was built on an adjoining site. Together, the two buildings have about 36 acres of floor space and cover 13 acres of ground. In 1965, Congress authorized the construction of a third building, the James Madison Memorial Building.
More than 17 million books and pamphlets can be found in the library today. But more than books are stored in this valuable research center.
You'll also find charts, engravings, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, musical compositions, photographs and phonograph records. There are actually more than 75 million items in the many collections.
The library has the largest collection of incunabula in the Western Hemisphere. Incunabula are books that were printed before 1501. There are 5,600 such ancient books on file, including a perfect copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first important book printed in the Western World.
The famous Library of Congress also holds the papers of almost every President from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge.
One of the special features in the Library of Congress is a 32 million piece manuscript collection that reflects all aspects of American life and culture.
Collections of Chinese, Japanese and Russian materials housed in the library are the largest in the world outside the Far East and Russia.
The library also supplies books in Braille and recorded books to blind and physically handicapped readers throughout the country.
One department of the library handles details of copyright laws. Two copies of every publication for which an author requests copyright protection must be deposited in the library.
The Library of Congress loans other libraries books that are unobtainable elsewhere and also supplies photocopies of other materials.