Warehouses allay clutter for nation's official pack rats

FORT MEADE, Md. - If the Smithsonian Institution is America's attic, then the Library of Congress is the basement. And like so many other cellars around the country, there's stuff everywhere.

Librarians must maneuver around books stacked on the floor because there's no room on shelves. The space problem began 200 years ago and has only worsened as the library accumulated 127-million items, with 10,000 more coming in every working day.

Most of the books are in the Madison Building, which is among Washington's biggest but can't come close to meeting the needs of the world's largest library collection.

"People think that everything goes on to the Internet these days, but the amount of print material is increasing by 7 percent a year," Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said.

It's not just books the library collects. There also are ancient clay tablets from Iraq, the first map to use the word "America," Stradivarius violins, century-old films and the latest hip-hop recordings.

A favorite of visitors is an exhibit with the contents of President Lincoln's pockets on the night he was murdered - a pair of glasses, some Confederate currency and a few favorable newspaper clippings.

To handle some of the millions of items, the library is building warehouses at Fort Meade, Md., 30 miles from Capitol Hill. The first of what could be as many as 13 buildings is finished and already almost half-full. About 500,000 volumes have been trucked from Washington - 2,500 a day.

About twice as far in the opposite direction, storage is being developed at Culpeper, Va., for the library's audiovisual material - such as recordings of Elvis Presley and Theodore Roosevelt, and movies of Thomas Edison and Ronald Reagan.

Steven J. Herman, chief of the library's collections, access, loans and management division, also called CALM, said it probably will take four years and up to four warehouses just to get the books off the floor in Washington.

Around Herman in the Fort Meade warehouse, 30-foot-high shelves stretch more than 50 yards. Mobile elevators like those in warehouse stores move along the narrow aisles. Librarians pluck requested books, identified by bar codes, from lidded boxes on the shelves.

Even with all the changes over the decades, the library remains true to its roots. It still does research for Congress. And the public still can visit any time and ask questions of librarians.

- Founded in 1802 as a research arm for Congress.

- Nearly all its books, maps and other items were lost when the British burned the Capitol during the War of 1812.

- Everything copyrighted has to go in the library. In 2002 alone, there were more than 500,000 new items.

- The library's collection now totals about 127-million items, including 56-million manuscripts, 28.7-million books, 13.7-million photos, films, prints and drawings, 5-million pieces of music and 4.8-million maps.

- The library's 4,085 employees did more than 800,000 research projects for Congress and recorded more than 2-billion transactions in 2002.

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