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The Library of Congress (LoC) is the world's largest library and is located
on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Besides books, it contains all kinds
of records, illustrations, magazines, maps and personal letters.
Much of the older material is stored on microfilm. Photocopying and copying by
hand-held cameras is permitted. Scanners are not permitted on the
premises.
Outputs:
How materials are copied depends on their format. Bound books are best
photocopied using the copy machines available in the reading rooms. In
those rooms without professional photocopying equipment, it is better to
photograph records using a high-resolution camera.
Photocopies can be sent directly to the client via regular mail or
scanned as PDF files and then "text recognized"* and e-mailed or copied
to a CD or DVD.
Photographs can be posted to a website or transformed into
"text-recognized" PDF files that can be printed out on any printer,
closely resembling the original in color (much more so than
photocopies, which often leave out details).
* Note: Searchable text-recognized PDF files are
created after the image has been converted into a PDF file using an OCR
(optical character recognition) program. Such files are searchable by
many search engines, such as Windows Desktop Search and Google Desktop
Search or the search tool that in included with Adobe Acrobat Reader.
These search tools do not work with handwriting and can be imprecise,
especially with old documents written with manual typewriters.
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