The 500th Post! A Milestone for 4 Corners of the World

(The following is a post by Jonathan Loar, South Asia Reference Specialist, Asian Division)

We are commemorating 500 posts on the 4 Corners of the World blog! Our 500th post appeared on June 30: “Pride and Belonging: A Journey to Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore in the European Reading Room.”

Launched in April 2016, 4 Corners is a collaborative project from reference librarians in four reading rooms—African & Middle Eastern, Asian, European, and Hispanic. It aims to bring you closer to the Library’s international collections with stories spanning the ancient and the contemporary, from writing on cuneiform tablets some 4,000 years ago to web archiving during Covid-19. The blog also gives our reference staff the chance to dig deeper into our collections and bring awareness, for example, to comic books in Russian, science fiction in North Korea, and POW camp newspapers for South Asian prisoners in Germany during World War I. See the “Categories” area of the menu at the top of this page for more content on specific topics.

In addition to collection highlights, the 4 Corners blog, as well as the International Collections Facebook Page, will continue to bring you the latest news and information from our reference staff. This includes alerts about research guides (e.g., Hispanic Division Country Guides), digital projects (e.g., Africana Historic Postcards), lectures and events (e.g., forum with Lao and Hmong American authors), and the results of work to make our collections more discoverable. With regard to the latter, we particularly enjoy highlighting our Junior Fellows and their projects in our divisions.

With great appreciation to all of our readers, authors, and guest contributors over the years, here’s to the next 500!

Subscribe to 4 Corners of the World – it’s free! – and the world’s largest library will send you cool stories about its collections from around the world!