ABSTRACT
In the Library of Congress (LC) general reading rooms, a reader goes to the great card catalog or queries the computer; he locates the books he wants and makes out a call slip for each title. Boorstin, himself a renowned scholar and museum director, related at once to the plight of the patron walking through the Library's doors. But the researcher should remember that the Library has never claimed totality. Primacy in medicine and agriculture was given up once federal libraries were founded in those areas. The state libraries and the state historical societies began to share the responsibility for Americana, and it soon became evident that local institutions could do a more efficient job collecting regional materials, town by town, county by county, than the distant LC. In 1980, completely aside from in-house use, 151,000 volumes were loaned out of the building—mostly to scholarly libraries around the country.
