The World in the Stacks: A Quantitative Study of Geographic and Language Representation in the Library of Congress Book Collection

Books remain an enduring form of cultural and scholarly communication, yet they are often underrepresented in quantitative studies of knowledge production. Drawing on more than six millions of bibliographic records from the US Library of Congress (LC) catalog, this study examines the geographic orientation of the LC book collection across three dimensions: subject headings, publication places, and languages. Using data extracted from MARC-format bibliographic records, we trace how geographic representations in the LC collection have evolved since the 1970s. The results reveal a gradual but significant diversification of the LC’s holdings, with growing representation of books from and about non-Western regions and an expansion of non-English materials. These patterns indicate the LC’s evolution from a predominantly Western-focused archive to a more globally distributed repository of knowledge. In addition, there is a strong alignment between the geographic subject, publication place, and language used by books, which can support the use of the datasets in future empirical research. By linking geographic subjects, publication locations, and languages, this study demonstrates the potential of library metadata to reveal large-scale cultural and informational shifts. The findings contribute to research on the geography of knowledge and highlight libraries as active infrastructures of global representation.