LOC's Public Domain Image Collections

About The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the de facto national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. The Library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; it also maintains the Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, which houses the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

The Library's first digitization project was called "American Memory." Launched in 1990, it initially planned to choose 160 million objects from its collection to make digitally available on laserdiscs and CDs that would be distributed to schools and libraries. After realizing that this plan would be too expensive and inefficient, and with the rise of the Internet, the Library decided to instead make digitized material available over the Internet. This project was made official in the National Digital Library Program (NDLP), created in October 1994. By 1999, the NDLP had succeeded in digitizing over 5 million objects. The Library has kept the "American Memory" name for its public domain website, which today contains 15 million digital objects, comprising over 7 petabytes.

The 15 million digitized items represent less than 10% of the Library's total 160-million item collection. This website is a part of the world's largest public domain image source picryl.com and is not associated with the Library of Congress.