Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi today announced that the National AIDS Memorial will become the new caretaker of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and NAMES Project programs. As part of the transition, the NAMES Project and the National AIDS Memorial have agreed to jointly gift care and stewardship of The Quilt’s archival collections to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The National AIDS Memorial Quilt Archive contains more than 200,000 photos, biographies, letters & other artifacts of the lives memorialized on Quilt panels.

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Top prize drawing by architectural team at Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., led by Christopher Howard. Features the Old Dominion Bank Building, now known as the Athenaeum, built in 1851 in Alexandria, Virginia.

The Library of Congress and the National Park Service (NPS) announced today that the 2019 Leicester B. Holland Prize will be presented to an architectural team at Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., led by Christopher Howard, an assistant professor of architecture and planning. The prize honors an outstanding historic building, structure or landscape drawing.

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The Library of Congress today announced the arrival of its 2020 Innovators in Residence, who will break new ground at the intersections of technology and hip hop, historic newspapers and classic illustrations.

Established in 2017 to invite creative people to develop research concepts and projects that connect the American people with the Library’s vast collections, the Innovator in Residence program brings some of the most creative and bold thinkers in-house at the largest library in the world. The Innovators in Residence for 2020 are Brian Foo and Benjamin Charles Germain Lee.

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Caption: "L.A. Murals," a new photography exhibition from the Library of Congress, is on view at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles through September 2020.

“L.A. Murals,” a new photography exhibition from the Library of Congress, documents murals painted on the streets of Los Angeles, an epicenter of the world’s street art scene.

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A new book explores the history of the early Americas — a story of before and after, defined and divided by the pivotal moment of contact, in 1492, between Europeans and the indigenous cultures of the New World — told through the collection of early American treasures in the Library of Congress.

On the European side, this is a tale of exploration, high-stakes treasure seeking and conquest. For indigenous Americans — including the Maya, the Nahua, the Taíno, and the Wari — it is the beginning of the end, a violent saga of disease, enslavement, and the loss of languages and rituals.

“Collecting for a New World,” published by D Giles Limited, London, in association with the Library of Congress, relates these encounters through vivid illustrations and interpretive descriptions of more than 60 rare and priceless items.

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The Library of Congress is seeking applicants for its 2020 Junior Fellows Summer Intern Program. This is a 10-week paid fellowship for undergraduate and graduate students interested in learning more about the work done at the largest library in the world.  For more information or to apply for the program, visit https://www.loc.gov/item/internships/junior-fellows-program/. The deadline to apply is Friday, Dec. 20.  

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Researchers, veterans and their families now have access to “Veterans and the Arts,” an online “Experiencing War” website feature highlighting the stories of veterans who pursued the arts during their post-military lives.

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Rosa Parks, the civil rights icon made famous for her refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, is often mischaracterized as a quiet seamstress, with little attention paid to her full life story. A new Library of Congress exhibition, “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words,” will reveal the real Rosa Parks was a seasoned activist with a militant spirit forged over decades of challenging inequality and injustice.

Opening Dec. 5, this will be the first exhibition of the Rosa Parks Collection, which includes her personal writings, reflections, photographs, records and memorabilia. 

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Collections Include Records of National American Woman Suffrage Association, President Lincoln’s Private Secretary, Olmsted Associates Landscape Architectural Firm, Federal Monetary Policy

Researchers and students have gained access to seven newly digitized collections of manuscript materials from the Library of Congress, including records of one of the most important women’s suffrage organizations, the papers of President Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and collections on the history of federal monetary policy. The availability of these collections added more than 465,000 images to the Library’s already vast online resources.

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Librarian of Congress Carla D. Hayden today announced her appointment of Steve Ruwe to the position of copyright royalty judge on the Copyright Royalty Board. Effective Oct. 13, Ruwe will serve an interim appointment through Dec. 7, 2019, followed by a six-year appointment.

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The Better Angels Society, the Library of Congress and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation today announced that the first Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film has been awarded to “Flannery,” a new film directed by Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco that documents the life of Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor.

“Flannery” is a feature-length documentary that explores the life and writings of O’Connor, whose provocative, award-winning fiction about Southern prophets, girls with wooden legs and an assemblage of unique and often fantastic characters has inspired artists, musicians and writers around the world.

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The Library of Congress has been awarded a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) project, which will pilot ways to combine cutting edge technology and the collections of the largest library in the world, to support digital research at scale.

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The John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress has welcomed several new scholars-in-residence to make use of the Library collections & engage in conversations addressing the challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.

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Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden today announced that country music titan Garth Brooks is the next recipient of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The multiple hall of famer is the youngest recipient of the prestigious prize.

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The Library of Congress today announced the selection of four organizations that will receive more than $1.1 million through its Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program to support the effective use of digitized primary sources in K-12 classrooms. The selected organizations will focus their efforts on creating teaching materials and professional opportunities for teachers using Library of Congress online resources.

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The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress has awarded commissions for new musical works to four composers. The commissions are granted jointly by the foundation and the performing organizations that will present the world premiere performances of the newly composed works.

Award winners and the groups co-sponsoring their commissions are Erin Gee and JACK Quartet; George E. Lewis and PUBLIQuartet; David Sanford and Meridian Arts Ensemble; and Agata Zubel and Talea Ensemble.

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Classic American crime novels will see new life in a new publishing collaboration between the Library of Congress and Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks. The Library of Congress Crime Classics series will feature a rich and diverse selection of books originally published between the 1860s and the 1960s, the Library announced today.

Titles are drawn from the Library’s collection of hard-to-find and out-of-print books, with cover designs inspired by images from the Library’s collections.

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In celebration of Constitution Day, the Library of Congress is launching a new website – constitution.congress.gov – for the Constitution Annotated, the authoritative source for how the Supreme Court has interpreted the nation’s governing document over the years.

With advanced search tools and a modern user-friendly interface, the new website makes the 3,000 pages of the Constitution Annotated fully searchable and accessible for the first time to online audiences – including Congress, legal scholars, law students and anyone interested in U.S. constitutional law.

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A new exhibition at the Library of Congress explores the fascinating evolution of visual storytelling styles in comic art – from panels in early newspapers to contemporary images of some of the most famous and funny characters in print. “Comic Art: 120 Years of Panels and Pages” opens Sept. 12 and will be on view for a year in the Graphic Arts Galleries of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building.

The exhibition draws from the Library’s extensive collection of comic art, which includes some of the earliest comics, including the first successful newspaper comic strip featuring Richard Outcault’s “The Yellow Kid,” early drawings of “Peanuts,” superheroes including Batman, Superman and the Incredible Hulk in modern comic books, and much more.

“The Yellow Kid,” first published in a panel in the New York World newspaper in 1895, is credited with sparking the rise of comics as a new American art form. By the middle of the 20th century, a growing number of diverse comic artists were examining their own life stories and commenting on culture and politics while expanding into graphic novels, fanzines and web comics. Comic art characters and narratives have also spread across film, television, books and marketing to reach even more people.

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The Library of Congress kicked off the 2019-20 school year by welcoming two teachers to its Capitol Hill campus who will work closely with the Library’s learning and innovation team to help make primary sources from the Library’s collections more accessible for teachers throughout the United States.

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From hot summer days in Mississippi to windy nights in the Caribbean, the Library of Congress’ latest crowdsourcing campaign, launched today, challenges virtual volunteers to explore folk and music traditions through the eyes and writings of one of America’s most famous 20th century folklorists, musicologists and oral historians: Alan Lomax. The new campaign — “The Man who Recorded the World: On the Road with Alan Lomax” on the Library’s crowdsourcing platform By the People — asks the public to help transcribe over 10,000 pages of field notes, letters and diaries from the American Folklife Center’s Alan Lomax Collection.

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Book lovers of all ages came together by the tens of thousands to celebrate reading and meet their favorite authors Saturday at the 19th annual Library of Congress National Book Festival, held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Thousands more watched the festival’s Main Stage streamed live on the Library’s YouTube platform. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the date for the 20th anniversary National Book Festival as Saturday, Aug. 29, 2020.

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Three organizations working to expand literacy and promote reading in the United States and worldwide will be awarded the 2019 Library of Congress Literacy Awards at the National Book Festival gala, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today.

Hayden and philanthropist David M. Rubenstein will award the top prizes to: ProLiteracy Worldwide of Syracuse, New York; American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults of Baltimore; and ConTextos of Chicago.

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The Library of Congress has restored and made available online the Gandhara Scroll, a manuscript dating back to around the first century B.C., that offers insight into the initial years of Buddhism. The scroll is one of the world’s oldest Buddhist manuscripts.

The scroll originates from Gandhara, an ancient Buddhist region located in what is now the northern border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The scroll tells the story of buddhas who came before and after Siddhartha Gautama, the sage who reached enlightenment under the Bodhi tree in eastern India around the fifth century B.C. and the religious leader on whose teachings Buddhism was founded.

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The Library of Congress National Book Festival will expand to include a yearlong series of events – to be known as National Book Festival Presents – featuring high-caliber authors, their books and related Library treasures beginning this fall, following the signature daylong festival on Aug. 31, the Library announced today.

Neil Patrick Harris, an accomplished actor, producer, television host, author and magician, will kick off the new series at the Library on Sept. 11 with his new book, “The Magic Misfits,” a bestselling series that is his debut for middle school children. In addition, on Sept. 24 prominent Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat will discuss her new book, “Everything Inside: Stories." Also, Joy Harjo begins her formal duties as the new U.S. poet laureate Sept. 19 with an inaugural reading of her work, including from her new book “An American Sunrise.”

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Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.