Library of Congress

  • Libraries Are the Real Punk Rock

    Libraries Are the Real Punk Rock

    Maybe I was only in the eighth grade, but I was ready to stand up to anyone who tried to threaten the ideal of intellectual freedom.

  • Swinging Modern Sounds #81: On Cultural Preservation

    Swinging Modern Sounds #81: On Cultural Preservation

    The Lost Boys had their moment in the media, but these people, these survivors, not boys at all and not lost now either, are still here, living lives, growing and changing and thinking and reflecting.

  • Our New Librarian-in-Chief’s Favorite Children’s Book

    Last week, Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress, making her the first woman and the first African-American in the position. Hayden talked with Jeffrey Brown of PBS Newshour about the challenges of her new position,…

  • The Popular Vote

    The Library of Congress recently polled American citizens to find out what books had the most profound effect on them. Among the 17,000-plus survey respondents, popular answers were books like Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King’s The Stand, and The Cat in…

  • New Ambassador for Young People’s Lit

    The Library of Congress is, for the first time, naming a graphic novelist as the Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. The honor goes to Gene Luen Yang, author of the graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints, among…

  • Playboy to Focus on Writing

    Ray Bradbury, Joseph Heller, Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac, and Kurt Vonnegut all found homes for their stories in Playboy. Now the publication better known for the highly photoshopped pictures of naked women plans to focus on its articles—by March 2016, the…

  • How Well Do You Know Library of Congress Subjects?

    Which book can be comprehensively defined by the keywords “married people,” “college teachers,” and “New England”? What about “totalitarianism” and “London (England)”? See how well you can categorize bookshelves with this quiz about Library of Congress subjects from The Toast.

  • Fugazi Meets the Library of Congress

    Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye gave a talk at the Washington D.C. Library of Congress about digital archiving and the need to educate creators. The landscape of archiving one’s work has dramatically changed in recent decades as everything can be instantly…

  • United Books of America

    The Library of Congress has put together a provocative list of 88 Books That Shaped America. (Happy belated 4th!) The LOC is also ready for nominations on what to add and why. The list is officially unfinished and meant to…

  • Notes on E-books and Readers

    The big news this week was the iPad announcement, including the tech-world’s dismissal of it. (Fraser Speirs addresses that nicely.) But there’s a lot more happening in the world of e-books. For example, NASA just opened an e-book section and…