The Library of Congress (LoC) serves as the national library of the United States. It claims to be the largest library in the world. Let’s see what digital offerings are available.
Steps
1. Physical.
The actual library is located across three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. It houses over 164 million items including books, photos, maps, recordings, newspapers, films, etc. Entrance is free to the public. However, only top government officials and employees can check items out. You can digitize items as long as you follow their rules. Find out more about the actual location and the offerings it has if you visit.
2. Digital.
Since we’re looking at the Library of Congress as a resource for public domain content, we’ll focus on the digital offerings. The first project the LoC started to digitize their collection was the “American Memory” for schools and libraries. The cost was prohibitive to send via CDs / DVDs, so they chose to distribute over the Internet. It became the National Digital Library Program.
The library has a budget of $6-8 million a year to digitize projects. They currently have about 15 million digitized items. While some items are detailed in this badge program, there is too much on this site to cover in a single badge program. Continue your exploration after you work through the steps below.
3. Public domain.
Not all offerings by the LoC are public domain. Be sure to read the information with the items you are interested before using them for your own content.
4. Collections.
Digital collections is one way the LoC supplies public domain materials. These collections house photographs, letters, books, recordings and more. Here’s a variety of collections to peruse. These are selected to give you an idea of the variety of items found here. If you don’t see any you like, check out the collections themselves.
- Abdul Hamid II Collection (Ottoman Empire)
- African-American Band Music & Recordings, 1883-1923
- American Ballroom Companion
- Architecture, Design and Engineering Drawings
- Baseball Cards
- Cabinet of American Illustration
- Chronicling America
- Civil War
- Daguerreotypes
- Fine Prints: Japanese, pre-1915
- George Washington Papers
- Historic Sheet Music Collection, 1800-1922
- Hotchkiss Map Collection
- March King: John Philip Sousa
- National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection
- National Screening Room (moving images)
- Origins of American Animation
- Posters: World War I
- Ragtime
- Rare Book Selections
- Rosa Parks Papers
- September 11, 2001 Web Archive
- Stereograph Cards
- Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606-1827
- Walt Whitman Papers
5. Rare books.
This collection has nearly 800,000 books. The digitized selections are not nearly as many as the actual archives. In this collection, you can find items like the Gutenberg bible, medieval manuscripts, Columbus’ letter (1493) and more. Some listings have PDF versions you can download. Some are the images of the pages that you can zoom to look at. Look through some of the rare books to see the quality of the digitized books.
6. Search.
If you don’t want to search by collections, you can search the entire site or just those items that you’re looking for. If you want to find old songs for a historical presentation, you might search the audio recordings or notated music. You can also do a search within a collection. Some collections are huge, so this is a lot faster than viewing thousands of items.
Since our example of public domain content was based on games, I did a search on “amusements.” I know this word was used instead of “games” through my research. Many of the references pointed back to the Internet Archive. My best bet at this point would be to go there and search for the book I was interested in . . . “Home Amusements.”
7. History.
The LoC also does a “Today in History” page where they highlight something within their collections. For December 9th, the day this badge is being released, the history page talks about Ralph Bunche, a US diplomat, member of the United Nations for more than two decades, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. He was the first African American awarded a PhD from Harvard. Check out the other pages for the month of December.
8. Crowd.
Currently under beta, the LoC is working to have others help with their digital archives. From transcribing to editing and even tagging, they are looking for volunteers. Their goal is to improve search, readability and access, especially for handwritten and typed documents. If you are interested in helping out, check out the campaigns currently available.
9. Eventbrite.
The LoC uses Eventbrite to host events. This includes film screenings, workshops and more. I’ve taken the introduction to Library of Congress through the Eventbrite application. Since it happened during the day when I was unavailable, I watched it later. Currently, nothing is listed due to the holidays. Check back and find an event to attend online.
Badge and Supplement Files
Member Level
- EP_Badge List_LoC_larajla — list of badge items
- EP_Badge Set_ LoC_larajla — list of badge set and related badges
- EP_Supp_List_ LoC_larajla — list of supplements for the badge
- SUPP_BPG_ LoC_2in_12up_larajla — generic badge printable
- SUPP_ LoC_Journal_larajla — badge journal
- SUPP_ LoC_Planner_larajla — badge planner
Supplement Fun
- N/A
Sites to Explore
- www.loc.gov
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress
- washington.org/visit-dc/library-of-congress-washington-dc
- www.loc.gov/events
- www.loc.gov/collections
- www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/december-10
- crowd.loc.gov
Get the infographic here > larajla blog post
Get the PDFs of the badge program / supplements here > Full badge PDFs