New Online at the Library of Congress: July 2026
The Library of Congress holds the world’s preeminent body of primary-source materials for the study of the life and work of George and Ira Gershwin, providing a nearly comprehensive record of their music and lyrics, as well as correspondence, photographs, business and financial papers, publicity materials, and press accounts.
This new digital collection primarily features their music (piano-vocal scores, orchestrations, and sketches) and handwritten lyric sheets and librettos. There are also manuscripts, lyric sheets, published sheet music, both concert and theater programs, and at least one self-portrait oil painting of Ira Gershwin smoking a cigarette. What other treasures can you find?
Community Collections Grants from the American Folklife Center supported contemporary cultural field research from 2022-2024. Read more about the program on loc.gov.
Chaldeans: Portrait of an Evolving Community
This collection documents the Chaldean community, an ethnic minority of Christians from northern Iraq with roots in ancient Mesopotamia. Chaldeans began migrating to the Detroit metropolitan area in the early 1900s, establishing a strong entrepreneurial presence, particularly in the independent grocery sector. With the support of a 2024 American Folklife Center Community Collections Grant (CCG), Project Manager Alex Lumelsky and Lead Story Editor Sarah Kittle documented three central themes of Michigan’s Chaldean community: the tight bonds of familial relationships; a strong commitment to church and spiritual life; and the community’s emphasis on entrepreneurship.
This collection features interviews, video tours of community sites, footage from the International Chaldean Convention, and business profiles, plus photographs and articles from the Chaldean News, the community’s publication of record since 2004.
Diversity Plaza: Queens as Cultural Crossroads
Los Herederos, a non-profit community-based organization in Queens, New York, received a 2023 Community Collections Grant (CCG) from the American Folklife Center to document Diversity Plaza, a vibrant public space in Jackson Heights, Queens, and the ethnically diverse and constantly evolving commercial and residential neighborhood that surrounds it.
Undertaken through the Library’s Of the People: Widening the Path! Initiative, the project features interviews with business owners, street vendors, local officials and members of the public on their use of and relationship to Diversity Plaza. The interviews address a range of topics, including: how this compact urban public space functions as a community gathering space for acts of culture expression and resistance; the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic; tensions associated with impending gentrification; and how residents feel about the threat of change and cultural erasure in one of the community’s most prominent shared public spaces.
New foreign legal gazettes, world newspapers, and more
We are happy to share a few other digital collections updates. Over 5,100 Legal Gazettes from Uruguay have been added to the Foreign Legal Gazettes in the Law Library of Congress online collection. And the South Asian Literary Recordings Project, which included 100 South Asian authors, has been migrated from a legacy site to a new loc.gov online collection.
Recently digitized newspapers from Panama and Argentina have been added to the new World Newspapers collection. One highlight is the Democracia (Buenos Aires, Argentina), available for 1945-1946 and 1952-1961. This daily Argentinian newspaper, originally published by Antonio Manuel Molinari, endorsed Juan Perón’s 1946 presidential campaign. This newspaper covers an important period of South American political history, including the rise of Juan Perón as well as the aftermath of World War II and its effects on South America.
Silent film score transcriptions now available
Volunteer transcriptions for the Silent Film Scores and Arrangements collection are now fully integrated back with their original digital collections on loc.gov, improving search and discovery for all.
Completed by participants in the By the People crowdsourced transcription program, the transcriptions for these silent film score cue sheets reveal titles, composers, and copyright information. As Paul Sommerfeld shares, “cue sheets provided suggestions to film accompanists for live music before the development of the sound film – “talkies” – by the end of the 1920s.” Read more about this collection in his blog post: By the People: Transcribing Cue Sheets for Silent Film.
In our December 2024 newsletter, we shared that the transcriptions for “Mr. President: What Will You Do for Woman Suffrage?”: Woodrow Wilson’s File 89 were added back to loc.gov. Now, all volunteer transcriptions from that campaign are available for download in a single file and we encourage you to experiment with them! Check out this blog post from our colleague, Madeline Goebel, to learn more about how to use the 36 By the People datasets: A New Resource to Explore Library of Congress Transcription Datasets.
Want to learn more about By the People and how to get involved for yourself? Watch our latest video below or on YouTube.
New old news from Rhode Island
Chronicling America is regularly updated with newspapers from contributors to the National Digital Newspaper Program. This month, we’re highlighting new old news(papers) from The Ocean State:
The Pascoag Herald and Burrillville News-Gazette (Pascoag, RI) 1895-1897 and related title The Pascoag Herald 1900-1918, are also available, with an example page below! Updates on the goings-on of locals were posted on the front page as “Home News.” Sermons by the popular Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmage or other religious figures often spanned the entire second page of each issue.
Pawtucket Gazette and Chronicle (Pawtucket, RI) 1850-1910 is also now available. The paper collected local news, poetry, and reports of world events, later expanding to include news, sermons, and style sections.
Check out the Chronicling America Research Guide for the latest updates to the Library’s digitized newspapers!
New onsite-only digital content
New items are added every week into stacks.loc.gov – the Library’s primary onsite-only platform for accessing restricted digital content. To learn more about Stacks, check out this video from our team: Access the Digital Stacks On-Site at the Library of Congress!
Recent highlights from Stacks include over 200 new volumes of the NBC Radio Master Books Collection and new issues of the Avengers and Captain America comics. Other new titles include: The bridge witch, The story of bubble gum, The law of health care finance and regulation, Computer-mediated communication: a theoretical and practical introduction to online human communication, and Representations of Japan in South Korean cinema of the Park Geun-hye era: invaders, lovers and demons.
And some seasonal additions to Stacks include: The World Cup as world history, Great moments in World Cup history, The history of Independence Day, The true story of the Declaration of Independence, and Why is it summer? (Truly, why is it summer?)
Please reach out to a librarian at ask.loc.gov with questions about accessing these materials using Stacks.
New web archives now available
The loc.gov records for the International Political Events Web Archive, the Bangladeshi General Election 2024, and Thai General Election 2023 have all been updated since our last edition. There are also four, brand new web archive collections now available for public use:
America250 Semiquincentennial Web Archive
Foreign Government Publications Web Archive
Preservation and Conservation Web Archive
Reproductive Healthcare Web Archive
Want to learn more about the America250 Semiquincentennial Web Archive? Check out this interview with Malea Walker on the Signal blog: Remembering the Past, Preserving the Present: The America 250 Semiquincentennial Web Archive!
Special feature: are you computational curious?
Interested in bulk downloading files from loc.gov, exploring the Library’s data packages, or using the Library’s image API (IIIF)? We have coding demos for that!
These coding demos show example Python code for interacting with the Library’s computational resources, such as our data packages or our suite of loc.gov APIs. The demos are designed to be an easy entry point for computational-curious beginners as well as more experienced coders. Each demo is in the form of a Jupyter notebook that can either be viewed online, downloaded and run on your computer, or uploaded to third-party Jupyter notebook online environments.
The demos can be found at https://libraryofcongress.github.io/data-exploration/. Here are a few highlights!
Stay cool out there this summer! We’ll be back in September with our next edition.
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