Happy 2025 to all of our Signal subscribers! In this special edition of “What’s New Online at the Library of Congress,” we’re looking back on some of our new digital collections releases in 2024.
Do you have a favorite digital collection or item at the Library? Leave us a comment below and stay tuned for our next newsletter in February. Cheers to a new year!
AIDS Memorial Quilt Records
This online collection presents digitized images of the AIDS Memorial Quilt panel maker files housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The panel maker files contain more than 150,000 mementos and ephemera submitted by Quilt panel makers to the NAMES Project and the National AIDS Memorial, which memorializes victims of HIV/AIDS. This digital collection presents the manuscript and still image panel maker records for Quilt panels that are more than 25 years old.
In this collection, a typical panel file contains a letter written by a panel’s maker. These moving and heartfelt letters often include memories and descriptions of the AIDS victim memorialized on the panel, or explain the maker’s motivations. The files also often contain obituaries, news clippings, and funeral service prayer cards. Files sometimes contain photos of the memorialized or photos of the Quilt panel being crafted. Read more about this collection and its history on the Library’s Timeless blog – The AIDS Quilt: Digitized at the Library.
Arabic Language Rare Materials Collection
This initial release of the Library’s Arabic Language Rare Materials Collection covers a very wide range of topics & formats, including religious works from different religions and religious sects, as well as works of history, grammar, literature, and science. Digitization of this collection is ongoing – stay tuned for more! In the meantime, read more about what’s in the collection on loc.gov.
Benajah Jay Antrim Journals
The journals of Benajah Jay Antrim (1819-1903), a chemist, photographer, mathematical instrument maker, and artist are now available on loc.gov. They are comprised of three volumes of handwritten diary entries, two complementary volumes of pencil or pen-and-ink drawings, and watercolor images of his February – April 1849 journey from Philadelphia, PA, to San Francisco, CA, through Mexico.
C. Hart Merriam Papers- Indian Vocabularies Series
Over 21,000 new pages from naturalist, mammalogist, ornithologist, and ethnographer C. Hart Merriam are now available online on loc.gov. This digitized section of his papers relates to his efforts to collect vocabularies of California Indians and other Native American language families from Indigenous knowledge bearers between circa 1902 and 1936. Having trained and worked extensively as a naturalist, Merriam turned to Native American ethnography as a primary focus in the twentieth century. To learn more about this collection (and the Schoolcraft collection from above!) check out this blog post from historian Barbara Bair – New from the Manuscript Division: Two Recently Digitized Collections Offer Native American Content.
Historical Media Publications Collection
The Historical Media Publications Collection is now available on loc.gov! This collection features over 4,400 items across a variety of publications showcasing the history of early motion picture, radio, and other broadcasting industries and trades published in the early twentieth century. Read more about the background of this collection on loc.gov.
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft Papers in the Henry Rowe Schoocraft Papers
Around 4,600 pages of digitized papers from the Henry Rowe Schoolcraft Papers collection are now online at the Library of Congress. This newly digitized portion primarily features Schoolcraft’s wife, the Ojibwe poet and translator Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay). She is the the first Native American woman poet to receive major literary recognition in the United States and co-produced the magazine, The Literary Voyager (Muzzeniegun), with her husband in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, in winter of 1826-1827 – featured below.
Law Library Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Books to 1600
This initial release presents the first 23 items in a collection of more than 90 manuscript books about law dating from before 1600 AD and representing a variety of languages and jurisdictions. The dates of their production range from the early 13th century to the end of the 16th century, and the texts contained in them represent more than fifteen hundred years of legal tradition from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages. They pertain to jurisdictions covering the Mediterranean basin, Western Europe, and the British Isles, and they cover legal systems including Roman law, canon law, feudal law, and the customary law of the European kingdoms as well as those kingdoms’ statutes.
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund
Spanning the years 1915-1968, with most dating from 1940 to 1960, these records document the work and procedures of the organization as it combated racial discrimination in the nation’s courts, establishing in the process a public interest legal practice that was unprecedented in American jurisprudence. The organization’s records cover a host of topics, including segregation in schools, on buses, and in public facilities, discrimination in housing and property ownership, voting rights, police brutality, racial violence, and countless other infringements of civil rights.
Pacific Encounters in 19th Century Japan
The initial release of this digital collection features rare materials at the Library of Congress that document early Japanese interactions with the United States and countries in Europe, namely Britain, France, Netherlands, and Russia. The Perry Expedition of 1853-54 figures prominently in many of these materials. Led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858), this expedition set out to establish diplomatic ties between the United States and Japan, a goal achieved with the signing of the US-Japan Treaty of Peace and Amity on March 31, 1854. Contemporary Japanese observers documented the expedition’s visit through a variety of media, including books, scrolls, and woodblock prints. They were particularly fascinated by the imposing presence of the “black ships” they spotted off the coast, some of which were powered by coal-burning steam engines. Within the collection are multiple examples of richly illustrated “Black Ship scrolls,” a genre that emerged from this period.
Robert Winslow Gordon Songsters
The Robert Winslow Gordon songster collection contains approximately 700 American songsters dating from 1844-1886, collected by Gordon. The word “songster” has been used for a wide variety of songbooks, but these are primarily pocket-sized pamphlets (approximately 3″ x 5″) collecting the texts of vaudeville, minstrel-stage, patriotic, humorous, religious, and traditional songs presented without music.
Gordon was the first head of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress from 1928 until 1933. He convinced Carl Engel, the chief of the Library of Congress’s Music Division, that grassroots traditions should be represented at the national library. Through his efforts, the Archive of American Folk-Song was established with private funding, and Gordon was appointed its director. He stayed at the Library of Congress for only a few years, but many of his collections remain with us in the form of recordings, manuscripts, and cheap print publications like these songsters. The Archive he founded is now the Archive of Folk Culture, part of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
South Asian Digital Collection
This online collection brings together both newly-scanned and previously-released digital content, and features approximately 900 books, serials, and manuscripts related to the present-day countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It includes items in South Asian languages (e.g., Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu), as well as items relevant to South Asia in English, French, German, and other languages. You will find materials about colonialism in South Asia, vernacular literature, religion and philosophy, grammar and linguistics, the rebellion of 1857, American and European accounts of travel in colonial India, and many other subjects in the broad field of South Asian studies.
Warp and Weft of Yap’s Outer Islands: Backstrap Weaving in Micronesia
The Habele Outer Island Education Fund in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) was one of 10 projects chosen to receive a 2022 Community Collections Grant (CCG) from the American Folklife Center to document traditional lavalava cloth weaving on the Ulithi Atoll. Undertaken through the Library’s “Of the People: Widening the Path” initiative, the resulting collection consists of 23 oral histories documenting the knowledge and artistry of women from the Outer Islands of Yap, who weave the beautiful and highly valued lavalava cloth, which remains an essential element in maintaining cultural traditions and community relationships among contemporary Remathau (People of the Sea).
The audio interviews are conducted in Ulithian, the Micronesian language spoken on Ulithi and neighboring Fais Island, with English logs provided for each. Obtaining substantial fieldwork in this previously under-represented language enables the American Folklife Center to expand its holdings of the roughly 500 languages currently represented in its archives.
Happy 2025 to everybody! To learn about Library of Congress digital initiatives including digital humanities, digital stewardship, crowdsourcing, computational research, scholar labs, data visualization, digital preservation and access & more, you can subscribe to the Signal blog via email.
*featured item citation: Sunter, J. P. (1888) A happy New Year to you. Bost. [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.