The CIA Library, available to Central Intelligence Agency

Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...

 personnel only, contains approximately 125,000 books and subscribes to about 1,700 periodicals. The Library maintains three collections—Reference, Circulating, and Historical Intelligence. New material for these collections is selected around current intelligence objectives and priorities. The reference collection includes core research tools such as encyclopedia

Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....

s, dictionaries

Dictionary

A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...

, commercial directories, atlases, diplomatic lists, and foreign and domestic phone books. CD-ROM

CD-ROM

A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

s and extensive commercial database services round out the collection. The circulating collection consists of monograph

Monograph

A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...

s, newspapers, and journals

Academic journal

An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...

. Many information resources are available to patrons at their desktop via the Digital Library. These include CD-ROMs and web-based resources and are accessible from the library's homepages. The library also participates in inter-library loans of circulating items with other domestic libraries. The Historical Intelligence Collection is primarily an open-source library dedicated to the collection, retention, and exploitation of material dealing with the intelligence profession. Currently there are over 25,000 books and an extensive collection of press clippings on that subject.