Today, the Library of Congress builds its holdings through private donations and purchases. Additionally, most authors seeking to register copyrights to intellectual property must deposit a copy with the Library of Congress. This factor alone makes the Library of Congress one of the most complete technological databases in the free world, preserving a record of American inventions from our early history as a nation. The LC classification system developed by the Library of Congress is in use by universities throughout the country and adaptations are used throughout the world.
The Library of Congress maintains extensive on-line resources which are made available to the public. No figure quoted here could ever hope to remain current, but to give a sense of the enormity of this body of on-line information, the 1995 edition of Microsoft Encarta states that this includes 26 million records stored in 35 distinct databases. One nice thing about this for Web page designers is that any intellectual property held by the U. S. government (and not a classified secret) may be repurposed by anyone for on-line or printed publication.