(The following is a guest post by William Kellum, manager in the Library’s Web Services Division.)
Presidential Collections
With the next presidential inauguration quickly approaching, we’ve updated a popular presentation from our old American Memory site on U.S. presidential inaugurations: “I Do Solemnly Swear…” A Resource Guide highlights items from the Library’s collections such as diaries and letters written by presidents and those who witnessed the inaugurations, handwritten drafts of inaugural addresses, broadsides, inaugural tickets and programs, prints, photographs and sheet music.
For Teachers
New for educators is a major overhaul of the popular Thanksgiving Primary Source Set, which has been updated with new content and a revised Teacher’s Guide. We’ve also put this set together as a Student Discovery Set for the iPad. You can see the full list of Student Discovery Sets on the teacher’s site.
Website Updates
Following up on our big home page and user experience improvements release last month, we continue to modernize key parts of the Library’s website. News from the Library of Congress is now updated with a simplified design of our news releases to make the content easier to read and use on all devices. We’ve also gone back and touched up the data for thousands of news releases going back to 2001, making it possible to filter searches of news items by topic.
Last month, we completed the latest release of the Legislative System of the United States, Congress.gov. The release included enhancements to the homepage, alerts and saved searches, legislation, Congressional Record and Congressional Record Index, committee reports and new capabilities for the advanced search form for legislation. You can see a full list of changes or check out the Law Library’s detailed blog post on the release.