It’s that time of year when many of us are getting ready to head to the airport and hop on a plane en route to family and friends for the holidays. Air travel, like many modern conveniences, is a perk easy to take for granted despite its relatively short history. A visual trip through the …
The Library’s vast, international poster collection is featured in the latest “Free to Use and Reuse” image set. You’ll find much to enjoy from the 1890s through the 1960s among the posters, which promote travel, commercial products, war propaganda, entertainment, and more. We selected these posters in a special collaboration with Poster House, a new …
This Autumn we offer a sequel to a post from this past Spring featuring pictures that cheer Prints & Photographs Division staff. This post’s contributors are all staff members in the Technical Services Section, who work hard to organize, describe, digitize and house for preservation the images in the collections, making it possible for you …
A column in The Hartford Courant discussing the decline of letter writing in the U.S. blames “this age of quick communication and rapid transportation.” While this is by no means surprising, the date of the newspaper article might be: Oct. 2, 1938! Yes, even 80 years ago, the art of letter writing was seen to …
Below is an interview with Vanathy Senthilkumar, who served on the Library of Congress Digital Conversion Team. Vanathy recently accepted a new job as a Librarian at the Government Printing Office, where we wish her the best of luck. Melissa: Like other members of the Library’s Digital Conversion Team, you serve on rotating details in …
The following is a guest post by Jan Grenci, Reference Specialist for Posters in the Prints and Photographs Division – as well as a long-suffering Pittsburgh Pirates fan. For almost as long as the game has been played, baseball imagery has been used to advertise a wide variety of products. These items from the Prints …
The following is an interview with Shaunette Payne about some of her varied responsibilities as a Technical Services Technician in the Prints and Photographs Division. Here we discuss her work with the Division’s stereograph cards, circus posters, and offsite collections. Melissa: You and other colleagues in the technical services section are working on a project …
Whenever I leave the urban landscape and go out driving in the country, certain things tend to catch my eye. One particular scene that always makes my head turn is a red barn on a hillside. The pop of color often draws me in. I have always wondered, though: Why red? It turns out, the …
There is a well-known quote by Pablo Picasso, which goes like this: Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. Perhaps these words appeal to me because they touch on the delightful imagination a child possesses, and how freely that creativity is expressed through art with …