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By: Kate Phillips
This post will preview the May 20, 2026 Finding Pictures webinar to be presented by Curator of Graphic Arts Sara Duke and Archivist Owen Ellis. The webinar will discuss the effort to process and make accessible printed ephemera received through the Copyright deposit program between 1909 and 1978. Materials include trading cards, design drawings, greeting cards, labels, and advertisements.
Posted in: Picture This
By: Kate Phillips
What do eggs and the sun have in common? They are both vital materials in photographic processes. Both are represented in graphic form in photography related items from the Library’s vast collection of U.S. Patent Office trademark registrations. The collection covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the exact moment the photographic industry exploded, becoming accessible to both professionals and amateurs alike. This week’s post will share a sampling of these.
Posted in: Picture This
By: Kate Phillips
Holiday cooking season is upon us. Today we’re looking at technologies intending to make our lives in the kitchen a bit easier. Drawing from advertisements, trademark registrations, photographs, and architectural drawings, this post highlights time, energy, and space-saving devices designed (in theory) to streamline our culinary experiences.
Posted in: Picture This
By: Kate Phillips
Today’s post uses Margaret Wise Brown’s classic bedtime story Goodnight Moon as a playful framework for exploring the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. It incorporates a variety of items from across the collection, including stereographs, lithographs, trademark registrations, and photographs.
Posted in: Picture This
By: Kate Phillips
Every other month, staff in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division come together for a “Learning Hour,” a time dedicated to knowledge sharing, training, and discussion. This month’s session took the form of a challenge: each participant opened an unfamiliar box from the collections and reported back on what they discovered. How is the collection arranged and described? What might a researcher encounter when using it? How could access be improved? This week’s post highlights some of the insights that emerged from that exercise.
Posted in: Picture This
By: Kate Phillips
Continuing in the same vein as last week’s post, today we are looking at the people, technologies, and skills involved with making ice cream. The post will incorporate both photographs and printed matter from the collection and will focus on home production of ice cream.
Posted in: Picture This
By: Kate Phillips
In a recent post, we introduced a slew of newly processed or digitized collections. This week we are highlighting a newly available and graphically fun collection, the U.S. Patent Office Trademarks—brands, logos, and images registered between 1869 and 1911. We will do this through a selection of whimsical images featuring magical and mythical creatures such as fairies, dragons, mermaids, and gnomes.
Posted in: Picture This
By: Kate Phillips
As our name suggests, here in the Prints & Photographs (P&P) division, we collect both prints AND photographs. It’s always fun when items work across categories and photographs speak to print culture. This month, as we’ve turned the page to a new year, I’ve been playing “spot the wall calendar” while sifting through images …
Posted in: Picture This