This blog post explores the posters included in the Minjuhwa Undong (South Korean Democratization Movement) collection housed in the Asian Division. It highlights how these posters, in conjunction with Minjung Art, vividly portray the key agents, objectives, and strategies of the democratization movement during the 1980s.
While staff work is what allows researchers to conduct research, their presence in the Library of Congress is foundational to the creation of the culture at the Library. This blog is an interview with Dan Paterson, a book conservator with the Library of Congress, conducted by Charlotte Giles.
The Asian Division is now accepting applications for its Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship, which supports short-term research visits to the Asian Reading Room at the Library of Congress. This year's application deadline is midnight Sunday, January 12, 2025.
(The following is a collaborative post with contributions from Elli Kim, Korean Reference Librarian; Joshua Kueh, Southeast Asian Reference Librarian; Cameron Penwell, Japanese Reference Librarian; and Ryan Wolfson-Ford, Southeast Asian Reference Librarian) With Halloween now upon us, we thought it would be interesting to learn more about ghosts, ghouls, and things that go bump in …
“World War II Records from Burma” is a diverse and unique grouping of documentary materials in the Southeast Asian Rare Book Collection. This post highlights documents from the collection concerning the Indian Independence League and Indian National Army, two Indian diaspora organizations that emerged prior to and during World War II.
Asian Division 2024 Junior Fellow Akhila Gunturu shares her experience inventorying serials on microfiche in the South Asian Collection. The post highlights the collection’s various uses through an analysis of the advertisements in the Telugu periodical Iṇḍiyā Tuḍē: Vārṣika Sāhitya Sañcika (India Today: Annual Literary Issue).
This post features answers to frequently asked questions about the Southeast Asian collections at the Library of Congress provided by the Library’s Southeast Asian reference librarians. Librarians touch on types of Southeast Asian materials available, who uses the collections, how the Library acquires its holdings, and how to access them.
(The following is a post by Charlotte Giles, South Asia reference librarian, Asian Division.) Valuable pieces of ephemera trace shifts in ideas, issues of importance, and the diversity of views in society at the time of their distribution. Because these materials are widely distributed to the public, they often create a meaningful and lasting snapshot …
Suzanne Karpelès lived a fascinating life of a scholar of Pali, Khmer, Thai, Tibetan, and Sanskrit, at a time when being an Indologist was a male dominated field, making a major impact on academic knowledge of Cambodian Buddhism, among other subjects. Her personal library is full of wonderful treasures from the early days of Western printing of Cambodian Buddhist works and rare Khmer manuscripts like the Reamker, the Cambodian version of the epic Hindu tale, the Ramayana. One can still access her unique library at the Library of Congress where it has found a home with the Southeast Asian Rare Book Collection in the Asian Reading Room.