The Library of Congress has one of the most extensive preservation programs for library materials in the world. Each year the Library’s preservation staff provides preservation treatment for countless objects in its collection of more than 155 million items. The Conservation Division cares for the Library’s special collections, including rare books and manuscripts, works of …
As the world turns its sympathy toward the Philippine islands devastated, just days ago, by the largest typhoon in recorded history, a fascinating fact has emerged and moved explosively across the Internet: Just over a century ago, those same islands – indeed that same nearly destroyed town on the island of Leyte, Tacloban – were …
The Library of Congress National Book Festival is just hours away! It’s free … it’s open to the public on the National Mall … and it’s got fun and fascination for readers of all ages and tastes. No fewer than 112 stellar authors – historians, novelists, children’s and teens’ authors, poets, biographers, illustrators and graphic …
With the Library of Congress National Book Festival just days away (it’s a week from this weekend, Saturday, Sept. 21 and Sunday, Sept. 22, free of charge on the National Mall) we have a lot to share in addition to more than 100 best-selling authors for readers of all ages. One of the great stops …
Let’s take a look back at some of the posts populating the Library of Congress blogosphere in August. In the Muse: Performing Arts Blog “We’ll walk hand and hand someday” — Music and the March on Washington Music played a pivotal role in the March on Washington. Inside Adams: Science, Technology & Business No Opera, …
You’ve heard, no doubt, about the Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, which was destroyed in a fire back in antiquity. (There are still debates about who torched it and why. We’ll probably never know.) You may also have heard that the national library of Egypt – the Bibliotheca Alexandrina – was rebuilt in an architecturally …
During one of my first visits to the Library of Congress’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, one of the division chiefs there pointed out the 35 mm projector in the theater. He commented that the sound of 35 mm film being fed through a projector is an “endangered sound.” My furrowed brow and quizzical look …
On Thursday evening, a very nice gift was given, and received, in an ornate room at the U.S. Department of State. Afghan President Hamid Karzai was the recipient – on behalf of several libraries and research institutions in his nation – of a trove of digitized treasures from the Library of Congress and its associated …
Old newspapers have acquired an iffy reputation over the years. We bemoan the trees that had to die to bring them into existence for their one day of glory; we dub them “mullet-wrappers” or note, as they do in the British Isles, that “Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper.” But old newspapers can be addictive! …
