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Category: Curators

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

All This Jazz

Posted by: Mark Hartsell

The human voice is music’s only pure instrument, jazz singer Nina Simone once wrote – it has notes no other instrument possesses. “It’s like being between the keys of a piano,” Simone wrote in a draft of an unpublished autobiography recently discovered in a Library of Congress collection. “The notes are there, you can sing …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Rare Object of the Month: Unrequited Love for the Ages

Posted by: Erin Allen

(The following is a guest blog post written by Elizabeth Gettins, Library of Congress digital library specialist.)  This month, the Rare Book of the Month is not actually a book but objects from the special collections within the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we take a peek into the …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

He Came From the Near East

Posted by: Erin Allen

(The following is a guest post written by Anchi Hoh, a program specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division.) If you read last month’s Christmas-related blog post “An Armenian ‘Three Magi’ at the Library of Congress” by Levon Avdoyan, you may be wondering how the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division acquired some of …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Flickr Commons – Going Strong!

Posted by: Erin Allen

(The following is a guest post written by Helena Zinkham, chief of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) Join us for a “photo countdown” to January 16, which marks the 8th anniversary of the Flickr Commons. The theme is bridges, because the Commons has grown to connect historical and contemporary photographs from more …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Highlighting the Holidays: An Armenian “Three Magi” at the Library of Congress

Posted by: Erin Allen

(The following is a guest post by Levon Avdoyan, Armenian and Georgian area specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division.) When I began working at the Library of Congress in 1992 as the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist to the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division, it was as if …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

“King Winter” – A Book to Bring in the Season

Posted by: Erin Allen

(The following is a guest blog post written by Elizabeth Gettins, Library of Congress digital library specialist.)  You’ve heard of Jack Frost and most certainly St. Nicholas. But how about King Winter? “King Winter,” a rare German children’s book written by Gustav W. Seitz and published around 1859 in Hamburg, borrows from Germanic and Norse …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

From Russia With Love: Illustrated Children’s Books in Hebrew

Posted by: Erin Allen

(The following is a post by Ann Brener, Hebraic area specialist in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division.) Imagine that some brightly plumed bird-of-paradise has flown in amongst your backyard warblers, and you’ll probably know how I felt upon discovering a beautifully illustrated book in the vaults of the Library of Congress. Nestled between …

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Trending: Food, Glorious Food

Posted by: Erin Allen

(The following is an article written by Alison Kelly, science librarian and culinary specialist in the Library’s Science, Technology and Business Division, for the November/December 2015 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM. You can read the issue in its entirety here.) Today’s popular food blogs are an outgrowth of recipe-sharing in America that …