Visitors to the United States Library of Congress will find it in the midst of major expansions of three kinds – expansions to preserve what otherwise might be lost, to protect what it already has, and to make what it has more readily and widely accessible. One current kind of expansion takes the form of constructing a new complex of four buildings in the side of a mountain near the city of Culpeper in the state of Virginia, about an hour's drive from the library's main facilities in Washington, DC. This complex, named the Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, will provide safe storage and new preservation and access systems for the film, video, and sound collections – 5.7 million items – administered by the library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. The library's second major current expansion consists of constructing off-site storage modules for other collections on the site of Fort Meade, a US Army installation in the state of Maryland, less than an hour's drive from Washington, DC. On this site, the library and its partners are finishing the third and fourth of a projected 13, high-density storage modules, designed to extend the life of parts of the library's holdings by a factor of six. The third major current expansion of the Library of Congress is on the Internet, where the library's website now offers some 10 million digitized items. Through financial and other partnerships, the library will continue to add to its online resources, and is working with UNESCO on a project to create a World Digital Library. This will be a collaborative virtual repository through which libraries worldwide provide access to rare, primary source materials, illustrating cultures in all parts of the globe, for the potential benefit of people everywhere.
