Myles Zhang, a senior at Columbia University, used maps from the Library of Congress to build animation showing the growth of New York City from 1609 to today.
This is a guest post by Flynn Shannon, who interned this summer in the Library’s Communications Office through the Junior Fellows Program. He is a student at Kenyon College, where he is pursuing a degree in classical mathematics with a concentration in scientific computing. The post was first published on “The Signal,” a blog covering …
This is a guest post by Ted Westervelt, a section head in the Library’s U.S. Arts, Sciences and Humanities Division; Kate Murray, a digital projects coordinator in the Digital Collections Management and Services Division; and Donna Brearcliffe, an electronic resources coordinator in the Collection Development Office. Since the first edition of the Recommended Formats Statement …
Middle- and high-school students visited the Library’s Preservation Research and Testing Division on May 9 as part of hands-on pilot program focusing on preservation science. Here, alongside Library scientists, the students use the Library’s hyperspectral camera system to discover concealed writing in documents. For the past decade, the Library has relied on increasingly sophisticated hyperspectral …
This is a guest post by Nanette Gibbs, a reference librarian in the Science, Business and Technology Division. Spring training is now under way, and in a few short weeks it will be opening day. In the Science, Technology and Business Division, we have something on nearly everything connected with the game of baseball: balls, …
This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It is published today to coincide with the anniversary of Alexander Hamilton’s birth: He was born on January 11, 1757. In the mid-19th century John Church Hamilton, a son of Alexander and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, published an edition of his father’s …
Thomas Edison, inventor of the first successful practical light bulb, created the very first strand of electric lights. During Christmas 1880, strands of lights were strung outside his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, giving railroad passengers traveling by their first look at an electrical light display. But it would take almost 40 years for electric …
On a dark and windy morning on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, 114 years ago this Sunday, Orville Wright took flight in a tiny airplane he and his brother Wilbur had painstakingly constructed. The 605-pound craft flew all of 120 feet and remained airborne only 12 seconds. After Orville’s first success, Wilbur set the …
This is a guest post by Margaret M. Wood, legal reference librarian in the Law Library. Two years ago, in honor of Constitution Day—celebrated annually on September 17—I wrote a post about the publication “Constitution of the United States: Analysis and Interpretation,” also referred to as the “Constitution Annotated.” Along with the U.S. Code, it …