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| Sunday, 6 March 2005 |
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Junior Observer |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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The most important library in the world
Libraries are a great source of knowledge and information. They are databases of the past, and provide gleanings into the future. The world's most important library is considered to be the Library of Congress in Washington DC, USA. It is important not only due to its size, which is impressive to say the least (making it one of the most important for visitors sightseeing in the US capital), but also due to the millions of books and documents it houses. Although it is known as the national library of the United States, besides US publications, it also collects books, newspapers and magazines in more than 450 languages from every country in the world. The Library of Congress, besides serving the Congress and the government, is also open to the public. Although it is now the most important library in the world, its beginnings were modest. It was started in 1800, in line with the wishes of President John Adams, with 5,000 dollars allotted by members of Congress for the purchase of books "which might be necessary for the work of the Congress" and which were to be housed in "appropriate quarters". The appropriate office was found in the Senate. The first load of 740 books and cards arrived from London a year later. The money spent those days on the library, by the Congress, was rather little. The library comprises three buildings. The Jefferson Building, which is its main component, was the first building constructed specifically for the library. It was designed by the architects John L. Smithmeyer and Paul J. Pelz in the style of an Italian Renaissance palace. It houses more than 45,000 reference volumes and a countless number of catalogues. The building itself is an impressive site, built according to the grander design traditions which prevailed those days. Although it was proposed as early as 1871, the building materialised only in 1897. The competition for project architects came to an end in 1886 and the building was finally completed several years later. It was named after President Jefferson very much later, but is a fitting tribute to him, as the library would not have materialised if not for his passion for reading and collecting books. The 3,000 volume library was destroyed during a British invasion of Washington in 1814 and it was Jefferson's collection of 6,487 books that laid the second foundation stone for the library.The library also adopted Jefferson's classification system for books, which thoroughly recorded and cross-classified the collection. The Library of Congress Catalogue Number, also known as LCCN, is used by libraries throughout the world now as a model and addition to their own classification systems. The other buildings of the complex are Adams Building, which was built in 1939, and Madison Building, which came up in 1980. The latter is said to be the third largest office building in Washington, after the Pentagon and the FBI Headquarters. More than 5,000 people work in these three buildings. Its annual purchasing budget is a whopping 330 million US dollars. The library is known as a wholesaler of information, with more than one hundred million objects listed in its catalogues. The items housed in the library include US President Thomas Jefferson's hand-written draft of the Declaration of Independence, a large collection of flutes from all over the world, many Stradivarius violins and baseball cards which had once been discarded but are now collectors' items. The library's database was digitized around 2000 through a 60 million US dollar National Digital Library project, which was financed mostly by corporate and other sponsors. However, the 22,000 drawers of index cards are still in the library although not in the main reading room where they once were. The quality of the services offered by the library is also unmatched. Some of them are copyright monitoring and Congressional Research Service. ############# An 'intelligent' building
The 23-storey building has an area of 500,000 square feet. It is a glass and steel structure with marble flooring and sleek furnishing. It is powered by four generators while the air-conditioning is provided by four chillers controlled by sensors, which recognize the number of humans present and the intensity of the sun.Therefore it is called an "intelligent building" and was said to be the only such building in Sri Lanka at the time of its completion in 2002. It also claims to be the only high-rise building in the country where all the consultants were Sri Lankans at the time of completion. The entire building is monitored by 150 CCTV cameras, thus making it a safe building too. One of the leading banks in Sri Lanka, Hatton National Bank has roots going back to 1888. The bank, then known as Hatton Bank, commenced business in 1888 to cater to the investors in large scale plantations. It evolved into a national bank in 1970 with the birth of HNB, created by the merger of Hatton Bank with the Kandy and Nuwara Eliya branches of the then National and Grindlays Bank Ltd. Five branches were opened at the same time to intensify its commercial banking activities. |
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| Politics | Produced by Lake House |
The Hatton National Bank Head Office at T.B. Jayah Mawatha, Colombo 10
is a rather modern landmark in the country, which has contributed to
change the skyline of Colombo. 
