The British Library rivals the Library of Congress in terms of the size of their holdings, with over 150 million items, many of them unique. According to its website, the library hosted “nearly 1.9 million onsite visitors” in 2017-to peruse its 167,000,738 items on about 838 miles of bookshelves.īritish Library, London, UK: 1.5 million visitors per year The Library of Congress is not only the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States (it was founded in 1800), but is also the largest library in the country and is among the largest in the world, if not the largest. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA: 1.9 million visitors per year They also recorded 4,241,307 online visits, 40,993 reference queries, 29,932 new member registrations, 174,224 collection items accessed, and 1,464,965 uses of digitized collection items. State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia: 2 million visitors per yearĪccording to its annual report, in the 2016-2017 fiscal year the State Library of Victoria saw 2,071,250 visitors, breaking the 2 million visit mark for the first time in its history and making it the busiest library in Australia. The library’s annual report puts their total visitors (across multiple locations) at 5.6 million (5,639,900, to be precise) in 2016. National Library of China, Beijing, China: 5.6 million visitors per yearĮstablished as the Imperial Library of Peking in 1909, the National Library of China is now the largest library in Asia, with holdings of over 35 million items. Probably only a couple hundred of those visits are me. The Central Library, the Brooklyn library system’s main branch, sees over 1.3 million visits per year. Schwarzman Building (what you probably think of as the Main Branch) received 2.3 million visitors, and the Mid-Manhattan branch, which is now closed for renovations, received 1.4 million (though a more recent estimate puts it at 1.7 million, so you may want to mentally adjust both numbers accordingly.)īrooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn, NY, USA: 8.1 million visitors per yearĪccording to a recent press release, the Brooklyn Public Library received over 8.1 million visitors in 2017, across its 59 branches. (92! That is impressive enough on its own.) Recent individual building or branch numbers were slightly more difficult to come by, but according to a NYPL press release, in 2012, the Stephen A. In their annual report, the New York Public Library reported that they had hosted 18 million visitors and circulated 23 million items over their 92 locations in 2016. New York Public Library, New York, NY, USA: 18 million visitors per year Now, with all those caveats in place, please enjoy the below popularity contest, and if you’re so moved, nominate your own favorites in the comment section.
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Plus, I admit that I did not research every single library in the world, but only the ones that seemed likely to rank.
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Not all of the libraries I researched had up-to-date public information about the number of visitors, or any information at all (so these I had to exclude), and there were a few cases where I found competing figures, or press releases in foreign languages. Basically, what I’m saying is: libraries should be even more popular than they are-but some of them are pretty popular already.ĭespite the definitive headline, the below list is admittedly inexact-as, I suppose, all lists tracking the movements of large numbers of people in and out of foreign and domestic institutions must be. Where else do you get something for nothing? Which is not even to mention the many programs, study space, use of computers, and other perks that most public libraries offer. I mean, if you think about it, the idea of a public library-where anyone in the community is trusted to borrow books, often for long stretches of time, for free, ad infinitum-is fairly magical. I don’t know about you, but I’m obsessed with my local library.