question: How do works selected for preservation by the Library of Congress actually function?
comment: There have been massive projects going on across the world for years now in order to digitize collections. Not only to preserve them, but also to make them available. You can read more about the work at LoC here URL_0 I'm not really all that familiar with how copyright and preservation works in the US, but it seems you also have exceptions to copyright based on non-commercial public interest. There [does appear to have been some debate here however]( URL_1 ). The idea is to store documentation of our history and culture and make it available to future generations. It's not something that happens all by itself and when it does it's mainly due to there still being an interest in it as a product. This does by no means ensure that everything worth keeping is being kept.
passages: For instance, the LOA text of Richard Wright's "Native Son" restored a number of passages that had been previously cut. The LOA commissioned a new translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" by Arthur Goldhammer for their edition of the text.
  
  Each volume also includes a chronology of the author's career or significant incidents in the case of the anthology volumes.
  
  Section::::Build and manufacture.
   In 1851, a fire destroyed two thirds of the Jefferson collection, with only 2,000 books remaining. By 2008, the librarians of Congress had found replacements for all but 300 of the works that were in Jefferson's original collection.
  
  Section::::History.:1851–1865: Weakening.
   The bulk of the project's singles are sourced from private collections, some which had previously been donated to libraries or even abandoned. These include:
  
  BULLET::::- The Joe Terino Collection, a collection of 70,000 78 rpm singles stored in a warehouse for 40 years.
  
  BULLET::::- The Barrie H. Thorpe Collection, which had been deposited at the Batavia Public Library in Batavia, Illinois, in 2007 by Barrie H. Thorpe (1925–2012). It contains 48,000 singles.
  
  BULLET::::- The Daniel McNeil Collection, with 22,359 singles.
   American Memory is a source for public domain image resources, as well as audio, video, and archived Web content. Nearly all of the lists of holdings, the "catalogs" of the library, can be consulted directly on its web site. Librarians all over the world consult these catalogs, through the Web or through other media better suited to their needs, when they need to catalog for their collection a book published in the United States. They use the Library of Congress Control Number to make sure of the exact identity of the book. Digital images are also available at Snapshots of the Past, which provides archival prints.
   According to the South Dakota Libraries Network copies can be found in the library of South Dakota State University; Augustana College; Northwestern State University; South Dakota State Library; Rapid City Public Library; Brookings Public Library; and the Siouxland Public Library. There is also a copy in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York City. There is no copy listed in Copac, the catalogue of UK copyright and university libraries.
   Those records created by Massachusetts government agencies and institutions held by the Massachusetts Archives are not copyrighted and are available for public use. Copyright for materials submitted to state agencies may be held by the person or organization that created the document. Patrons are responsible for clearing copyright on such materials.
  
  Section::::Minnesota.
   BULLET::::- The Meredith Nicholson Collection contains letters and manuscripts.
  
  BULLET::::- The Booth Tarkington Collection holds an original manuscript of Kate Fennigate, typed pages showing corrections, and the final typed copy of the book.
  
  The "Children’s Literature Collection" contains about 2,000 volumes, ranging from Indiana authors, illustrated editions, some award-winning titles, and a variety of historical materials such as prominent Indianapolis children's authors Eth Clifford, Mabel Leigh Hunt, Jean Brown Wagoner, and Guernsey Van Riper.
   The Hopkins US System contained about 163,000 paper records representing several hundred thousand identified specimens or series of specimens. These are either of insects or samples of insect-damage. Each record has information about taxon, insect and plant association, collection location, date, and collector at a minimum. In addition to the drawings and textual narratives, the record can also have measurements, notes on the research study or spray program, or rearing and other biological data provided by the original collector.
  
  Section::::Organizational framework.:Specimen collection, preparation and record keeping.
   Besides the works of many individual writers, the series includes anthologies like "Reporting World War II" and (in a different format from the above illustration) "Writing Los Angeles".
  
  The publisher aims to keep classics and notable historical and genre works in print permanently to preserve America's literary and cultural heritage. Although the LOA sells more than a quarter-million volumes annually, the publisher depends on individual contributions to help meet the costs of preparing, marketing, manufacturing, and maintaining its books. Some books published as additions to the series are not kept in print in perpetuity.
   Also in 2013, Artepublishing, a division of the fine-art book publisher Hugh L. Levin LLC, produced an electronic book, "Great Photographs From the Library of Congress," that included more than 700 images from the library's Prints & Photographs Division. Most were black-and-white historical photos, going back to the Civil War work of Mathew Brady, but 22—more than any devoted to any other photographer—were chosen from Carol M. Highsmith's archive of late-20th- and early-21st-century photographs.
   A number of entities have scanned all or some of the volumes of the CCE. The Stanford Library and the University of Pennsylvania library have each scanned a section of the records and put them into a database. At the University of Pennsylvania, they have scanned book and serials renewals, searchable by year at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/ . Stanford has also placed renewal records into a https://exhibits.stanford.edu/copyrightrenewals?forward=home searchable database. More recently, Google has indexed many volumes of the CCE into a searchable index, available at https://books.google.com/googlebooks/copyrightsearch.html . The Internet Archive has similarly scanned and indexed the volumes of the CCE, as well as many other US Copyright Office works, and makes the works both searchable and viewable as scans by searching for the "collection:copyrightrecords" at https://archive.org/.
   A complete NAAN registry is maintained by the California Digital Library and replicated at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the US National Library of Medicine. In June of 2018 it contained over 530 entries, including the following:
  
  BULLET::::- 12025: National Library of Medicine
  
  BULLET::::- 12148: Bibliothèque Nationale de France
  
  BULLET::::- 13030: California Digital Library
  
  BULLET::::- 13038: World Intellectual Property Organization
  
  BULLET::::- 13960: Internet Archive
  
  BULLET::::- 14023: Revista de Arte, Ciência e Comunicação
  
  BULLET::::- 14365: Colectica
  
  BULLET::::- 15230: Rutgers University
  
  BULLET::::- 17101: Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
  
  BULLET::::- 20775: University of California, San Diego
   BULLET::::- Rosenberg, Jane Aiken. "The Nation's Great Library: Herbert Putnam and the Library of Congress, 1899–1939" (University of Illinois Press, 1993)
  
  Section::::External links.
  
  BULLET::::- The Library of Congress website
  
  BULLET::::- YouTube channel
  
  BULLET::::- Search the Library of Congress catalog
  
  BULLET::::- Congress.gov, legislative information
  
  BULLET::::- Library Of Congress Meeting Notices and Rule Changes from The Federal Register RSS Feed
  
  BULLET::::- Library of Congress photos on Flickr
  
  BULLET::::- Outdoor sculpture at the Library of Congress
  
  BULLET::::- Library of Congress at FamilySearch Research Wiki for genealogists
  
  BULLET::::- C-SPAN's Library of Congress documentary and resources
  
  BULLET::::- The Library of Congress National Library Service (NLS)
   Many private entities provide preservation and conservation services and supplies. One of the most well known companies in preservation is Hollinger Metal Edge. They sell Hollinger boxes, folders, AV preservation tools, archival paper, exhibit material, and even furniture. Gaylord Archival is another trusted company when it comes to archival supplies, as is University Products.
  
  Section::::Education.
   In 1962, as they were touring the US, Dr Malthête and Madeleine located 31 films by Méliès deposited as Paper print in the Library of Congress in Washington. In 1977, Leon Schlesinger’ widow authorised Blackhawk Films to restore and copy some films: 49 were then added to the collection. In 1979, the Library of Congress (Washington) bought the whole Schlesinger's collection: Les Amis de Georges Méliès acquired 8 new films.
   Section::::Progress Reports.
  
  Of Zheng Zhenduo's 9 reports, one page from each report is displayed on the Rare Books, National Central Library website about this activity. The following excerpts give a flavor. National Central Library website for Rare Books special exhibition: Progress Reports
   Libraries and indexing services handle them in various ways. The Library of Congress catalogs each part of them as an individual book with an individual call number and ISBN and a series note (technically a series added entry for the overall series, which has its ISSN, and usually a call number. As the Library of Congress receives two copies of most scholarly books as copyright deposits, it normally keeps one by individual call number and one by series call number. Most other libraries do not have that luxury and have to choose. The Anglo-American Cataloging Rules 2nd edition allows either of these options to be used.
   Section::::Major digitized collections.:Audubon's Birds of America.
  
  The University's complete double elephant folio set of John James Audubon's "The Birds of America", one of only 120 complete sets of all 435 plates in existence, was preserved and restored over a five-month process in 2000. In 2007, along with the five volume set of Audubon's "Ornithological Biography," the plates were digitized at high resolution and made available in one complete online collection.
  
  Section::::Major digitized collections.:Darlington Digital Library.
   Granary Books has placed archives in: The Library of Congress; Beinecke Library at Yale University; Fales Library at New York University, Mandeville Special Collections Library at University of California, San Diego; Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley; New York Public Library, John Hay Library at Brown University; and Green Library at Stanford University, among others.
  
  In 2013, Columbia University Libraries/Information Services’ Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired the archive of Granary Books which includes over thirty years of materials which reflects the complete history of the press.
  
  Section::::Threads Talk Series.
   The subjects represented by the division mirror the subjects of the other Clements divisions with strengths in American military history, political and social histories, American urban and landscape views, portraiture, satire, popular culture, leisure activities, labor, technology, travel, and culinary history. Examples of almost every printing and photographic process used from the 15th to the 20th centuries exists within the collections.
  
  The Library has recently acquired the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography, representing over 100,000 photographs taken from ca. 1845 -1980 in the state.
  
  Approximate numbers for the division holdings:
  
  BULLET::::- Prints—9400 items
  
  BULLET::::- Photos—150,000
  
  BULLET::::- Ephemera—10,000
   Section::::Areas of collection and extent.
  
  By 1919 at the latest, the Hamburg archive collected "press clippings on a global scale". The archive was subdivided in four sections:
   The National Library of Australia holds a complete set of the AJCP reels, and the various State Libraries hold large collections as well (particularly those related to the relevant state). Libraries and archives throughout the world also hold parts of the AJCP, including in New Zealand, the United States of America, Canada, South Africa, and Pacific island countries.
  
  In 1972 the first edition of a handbook was produced, which listed the contents of the reels. The final edition was published in 2005 by the National Library of Australia.
  
  Section::::History.
  
  Section::::History.:Background.
   Section::::Significance to preservation.:Library of Congress.
   Section::::Critical reception.
  
  "The Smithsonian Folkways Collection" received unanimously positive reviews from critics. On the critical aggregator website Metacritic it has a score of 95 out of 100, based on reviews by eight critics, indicating "universal acclaim". 
   Although many of the library's books perished in the flames of 1814, the library expanded to over 5,000 volumes by 1830, largely through its role as preserver of all copyrighted material. Because of this, the collections of the Department Library grew faster than those of the Library of Congress, which had been established in 1800, although many of the books received for copyright preservation were not within the scope of the Department of State Library's interests.
  