Thank you for visiting the Library of Congress Web site and for using the Ask A Librarian service.
The vast majority of the holdings of the Library of Congress are available only in their analog formats; and the most of that (and some of the digital resources) are indeed copyright protected.
Much of the digital (and converted-to-digital) materials presented on the Library's Web site, however, are in the public domain, either because their copyrights have expired, their rights were given to the public domain by their rights-holders, or they were "born" in the public domain, as is the case for work created by the U.S. federal government. Rights status is one of the considerations when the Library's staff selects materials to be placed on its Web site.
In some cases, the Library makes copyright-protected images available on the Web in small (thumbnail) GIF image file formats for reference. Where there is no copyright, there may still be other applicable rights, for example privacy rights.
This guide, written about prints and photographs collections at the Library, actually applies more widely. Perhaps you will find it helpful:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/195_copr.html . This page has links to rights statements for many of the Library's prints and photographs collections:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/rights.html .
The metadata created by the Library of Congress about its collections is not copyright-protected; this applies to both materials available online and to information about the analog collections presented in the Library's online catalogs
http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
At present, the Library has more than 50 million files presented on its Web site, representing a few hundred thousand items held by the Library. These items include books and other printed materials, manuscripts, maps, music scores, sheet music, photographs, prints, audio files, some video materials, and three dimensional objects. Some of these materials are also presented on YouTube
www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress, iTunesU, and Flikr
https://www.flickr.com/people/library_of_congress/?ytcheck=1 . In addition, about 150,000 of the Library's books are presented in the online book collections of the Internet Archive Texts
https://archive.org/details/library_of_congress , HathiTrust
http://www.hathitrust.org/ , and Google Books
http://books.google.com/ .
Parts of the Library's Web site are presented by the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine
https://archive.org/web/ .
Anyone is free to re-purpose public domain materials. Credit to the Library of Congress, or other source archive is appreciated.
I have forwarded your request and your contact information to the Library's Web Development team; if there is interested, someone there will be in touch with you directly.
Yours truly,
Reference Specialist
Digital Reference Section
The Library of Congress
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Perhaps we could invite some of the worlds major Library web development teams from around the world for the beta?
