I have worked at the Library of Congress for just over 10 years and am still amazed by what I find.
When I first started, the various directories, credit reference books, telephone books, and salary surveys thrilled me. Sometimes I felt that there was a book or journal on every topic. That feeling really hasn’t gone away. There are two collection areas – manuscripts and microforms – that continue to remind me of the wealth of business-oriented materials I have yet to “discover.”
When I wrote a post on the manuscript collection of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, it occurred to me that what we had gathered on our Business’ Special Collections: Business, Economic, and Labor History page was just the tip of the iceberg. I made a concerted effort to identify other manuscript and microform collections to include on this page and eventually this developed into a project for one our interns, Joseph Etoo.
We have just updated the web page with many “new” discoveries. Without going into detail, here are just a few examples:
- Reports and summary proceedings of the World Bank, 1946-1974.
- Records of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, 1918-1965.
- Columbia Records paperwork collection, 1923-1964.
- The Extel records: archives of the Exchange Telegraph Co. Ltd., 1872-1966.
- Albert Gallatin papers, 1761-1880.
- Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway System records, 1849-1909.
- Henry Morgenthau papers, 1795-1941.
- Papers of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
If you want to see more, just click on over. While I have often included links to some of the various “special” collections in blog posts, I really hope to focus on particular collections in future posts.