This September 17-20, staff from the Library of Congress education team will be in Albuquerque, New Mexico, exhibiting and presenting at the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. If you plan to attend, please visit us in the exhibit hall or attend the presentation. We look forward to discussing any needs you have and sharing some of the many free online resources we have to assist you in your efforts!
On Thursday, September 18, at 9:45 a.m., we’ll present a one hour session on opportunities for local history research using Library of Congress digital collections. Featured resources will include:
- the Chronicling America historic newspaper archive,
- Sanborn and panoramic map collections,
- the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey, and
- various photograph collections.
The session will demonstrate practical research strategies, tips, and shortcuts to help participants efficiently navigate the Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov.
And here are some additional resources that librarians have told us are helpful:
- Teacher’s Site — resources and strategies for educators, including curated primary source sets and an educator’s blog.
- Free to Use and Reuse Sets — curated collections of digital images on a variety of topics.
- Blogs.loc.gov — additional blogs, written by experts at various library divisions, such as rare books, manuscripts, maps and more!
- Veterans History Project — Library initiative that collects, preserves, and displays the firsthand recollections of U.S. military veterans.
- National Library for the Blind and Print Disabled — a free national library program that provides braille and recorded materials to people who cannot see regular print or handle print materials.
We hope to see some of you at the conference, but whether you attend the conference or not, we hope that you’ll explore some of the free resources from the Library of Congress.
Comments (2)
You guys are and have ever been , a National Treasure. One that we have always taken pride in; have known , on a visceral level that you were collecting our history and making it available to us (IF we wanted to know our TRUTH.)
P.S. Don’t let the alligators win in their efforts to strip out the parts of our TRUTH that doesn’t fit THEIR desired vision. Truth IS TRUTH.
I’m so glad you included Chronicling America among the resources! I am often in search of people who might be completely unfindable if not for the digitization of community newspapers. Even the advertisements and photo captions are OCR searchable!