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Archive: February 2023 (3 Posts)

Image showing four pictures of cabinets, with books, parchment, paper and CDs

What a CHARMing Collection!

Posted by: Amelia Parks

One unique and CHARMing collection at The Library of Congress is made up of other peoples’ discards, handmade replicas, and miscellany. A non-collection as it were, it is an amalgamation of reference samples and materials used by preservation scientists to expand discovery and research opportunities.

Four portrait images depict the Jordan family, one man and three women, in sepia tones.

Treatment of Crayon Enlargements from the Nelson W. Jordan Family Papers

Posted by: Lily Tyndall

Read more to learn about the Nelson W. Jordan Family Papers, a collection of correspondence, scrapbooks, genealogical information, and more from this important African-American family. Nelson W. Jordan was born a slave, and was a soldier and a minister; his family continued to be active community members in Virginia and New Jersey. This post details the conservation treatment of crayon enlargements depicting the family's patriarch, Nelson Jordan, and two of his daughters, Julia and Carrie.

Close-up view of two hands carefully at work on an aged, yellowing manuscript with handwriting

Working at Scale: The Firehose of Data

Posted by: Aaron D. Chaletzky

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world with over 173 million cataloged items. For the past decade, digitization of this enormous collection has increased exponentially. The Preservation Services Division (PSD) is responsible for a huge portion of this effort, managing contracts for the digitization of millions of pages of books, newspapers, and microfilm frames each year. All of this imaging results in a lot of data, hundreds of millions of files, and this is how we manage that data.