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By: Anne Holmes
The following guest post is by Sasha Dowdy, program specialist in the Library’s Young Readers Center. To have great poets, there must be great audiences. So said Walt Whitman, the famous 19th century American poet born on this day in 1819. And most would say Whitman became that great poet with even greater audiences: Whitman …
Posted in: From the Catbird Seat
A few years ago, I tried out a summer “looking” challenge in an attempt to parallel the clever ideas my local public library uses to encourage summer book club participants to pick out volumes they might not have otherwise sampled (“Summer Looking Challenge–Touring the Collections with Azure Allure“). It’s getting to be that time of …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Peter Armenti
The following guest post, part of our “Teacher’s Corner” series, is by Rebecca Newland, a Fairfax County Public Schools Librarian and former Teacher in Residence at the Library of Congress. At this time of the school year, many of us are preparing to send our students to the next grade level, the next school, or …
Posted in: From the Catbird Seat
By: Meghan Ferriter
This is a guest post by Matt Miller, a Linked Data Applications Technical Specialist in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office in Library Services. Wikidata is described as “a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.” Very similar to its wider known sibling Wikipedia, Wikidata …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Meghan Ferriter
The Library of Congress celebrates an exciting milestone as Chronicling America, the online searchable database of historic U.S. newspapers, now includes more than 15 million pages! To mark the occasion, we are throwing a #ChronAmParty on Twitter and unveiling a set of interactive data visualizations that help reveal the variety of content available in a corpus of 15 million digitized newspaper pages.
Posted in: The Signal
The following is a guest post by exhibition co-curator Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints, Prints & Photographs Division. Writer James Baldwin observed that “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.” The Library of Congress exhibition Art in Action: Herblock and Fellow Artists Respond to Their Times explores the role of artists …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Dan Turello
Like almost everyone else these days, we at the Kluge Center have been talking about “Game of Thrones.” An exchange with historian Lev Weitz inspired this blog conversation. Lev is a Kluge Fellow and is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Islamic World Studies at the Catholic University of America. The text of our conversation …
Posted in: Insights
By: Jaime Mears
In October 2018, the Library published a new digital strategy describing the Library’s objectives for digital transformation over the next five years. The strategy describes goals such as growing online collections, creating opportunities for deeper engagement, and investing in an innovation culture that supports a changing information landscape. In an effort to reflect some of …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Peter Armenti
The following cross-post is by Alison Hall, a writer-editor for the Office of Public Information and Education in the U.S. Copyright Office. It also appears on the Copyright: Creativity at Work blog. Not only is the Library of Congress celebrating the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth all month, but May is also the anniversary …
Posted in: From the Catbird Seat
By: Alison Hall
Not only is the Library of Congress celebrating the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth all month, but May is also the anniversary of Leaves of Grass, one of Whitman’s best-known works. Walter Whitman (as he called himself then) registered his copyright for the first edition of Leaves of Grass on May 15, 1855, in …
Posted in: Copyright