New Online at the Library of Congress: May 2026

Interested in learning more about what’s new in the Library of Congress’s digital collections? The Signal shares regular updates and we love showing off our colleagues’ hard work from across the Library. Read on for a sample of recent additions and a few favorite highlights. Click here for all previous updates.

Did you know that some of the very first music digitized by the Library of Congress was copyrighted sheet music? First appearing in Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, ca. 1870-1885, the Library now offers a brand new collection, Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, After 1885. This recently released collection picks up where the earlier one left off: 1886!

Due to their extreme rarity (many only exist in a handful of remaining copies), these items have been scanned to document their physical characteristics and contents as completely as possible. The bulk of 1880s copyright deposits consisted of popular songs with piano accompaniment, music for church or other Christian worship settings, solo piano music (from beginner’s ditties to virtuoso showpieces), and “stock” arrangements of popular titles for chamber orchestra or wind band.

Community Collections Grants from the American Folklife Center supported contemporary cultural field research from 2022-2024. Read more about the program on loc.gov.

Tenth Street Historic District and The Bottom in Dallas’s Oak Cliff Freedmen’s Town

The If Tenth Street Could Talk collection documents the history, legacy, and present-day realities of the Tenth Street Historic District in Dallas, Texas – widely recognized as the most intact Freedmen’s Town in the United States. Founded in the decades following Emancipation, the community emerged as part of a broader national pattern of Black settlements established by formerly enslaved people who acquired land, built institutions, and created self-sustaining communities.

Read more about this collection in this blog post from Folklife Today, If Tenth Street Could Talk Online! Exciting News from Community Collections Grant Recipients Tameshia Rudd-Ridge and Jourdan Brunson.

Continuing Comanche Culture: Culture as Making, Craft as Shared Story

Continuing Comanche Culture: Culture as Making, Craft as Shared Story is an initiative undertaken by a research team of Comanche community members and University of Oklahoma faculty to record, preserve and present the work and words of skilled artisans on the production of distinctive, hand-made objects. A focus on artistic forms, cultural functions and sociohistorical contexts lies at the heart of this documentary collection on Oklahoma’s Comanche artists and the items they produce for daily wear and public events.

African American Ballet in Washington, D.C.: A Legacy in Motion

African American Ballet in Washington, D.C.: A Legacy in Motion features oral interviews with African American, Washington, D.C.-based ballet legends Sandra Fortune-Green, Virginia Johnson, Beatrice Davis-Williams, Lynn Welters, and Kahina Haynes, providing firsthand accounts about what it meant to build ballet programs for Black dancers at a time when access to classical training was extremely limited. The collection highlights Washington, D.C.’s rich history, from the early 1920s to today, of African Americans in the field of ballet.

Read more about this collection in this blog post from Folklife Today, Making Their Pointe: An interview with Community Collections Grant recipient Kamilah Thurmon.

Founded in 1884, the Journalist was a weekly trade newspaper covering the newspaper industry until it merged with rival Editor and Publisher in 1907. The Journalist was known for its detailed profiles of newspaper titles, as well as editors and reporters. Notably, these profiles also covered prominent women and African Americans in the industry.

New foreign legal gazettes, HLAS, and more!

In addition to our brand new releases above, we also have a few other digital collections updates to share.

The Handbook of Latin American Studies digital collection (HLAS) is available now on loc.gov! This initial release provides a way to search the bibliographic citations and descriptive annotations from Vol. 35 all the way to the present. Written by scholars of Latin American studies and edited by librarians in the Hispanic Reading Room at the Library of Congress, HLAS is a scholarly, reliable, annotated guide to publications on Latin America.

Over 100 Foreign Legal Gazettes are available from Macau and 300+ items are now in the Silent Film Scores and Arrangements collection after they entered the public domain this year. And do you remember reading about the Lao Special Guerrilla Unit and Royal Lao Army Veteran Interviews in this newsletter back in May 2025? There are nine new interviews now available in this collection from the Asian Reading Room.

30,000 volunteer transcriptions and new datasets

We’re excited to announce that nearly 30,000 volunteer transcriptions from the By the People crowdsourced transcription program are now fully integrated back with their original digital collections on loc.gov, improving search and discovery for all:

Transcriptions from the Sheet Music of Musical Theater campaign

Transcriptions from the Christian A. Fleetwood Papers campaign

In our January edition, we shared the By the People program returned tens of thousands African American Perspectives in Print and Women’s Suffrage in Sheet Music volunteer transcriptions back to their original digital collections on loc.gov. Transcriptions from these campaigns are now available as brand new, full-text datasets on loc.gov. Click below to access the catalog records and files:

Transcription dataset from the African American Perspectives in Print campaign

Transcription dataset from the Women’s Suffrage in Sheet Music campaign

Want to learn more about By the People and how to get involved for yourself? Watch our latest video below or on YouTube and check out Volunteer to Transcribe the American Revolution in Context to learn more about joining us for a webinar on June 4, 2026 (registration required).

Revolutionary War era newspapers now available

Chronicling America is regularly updated with newspapers from contributors to the National Digital Newspaper Program. Digitized newspapers are delivered in the form of batches, where each batch can contain one to many issues, from one or more newspaper titles. Recently loaded batches can be discovered in the Chronicling America Research Guide. 

To commemorate the country’s semiquincentennial this year, Chronicling America has released newspapers from the Revolutionary War era:

The Connecticut Courant (1773-1783), Hartford, CT

The Gazette of the State of South-Carolina (1777-1784), Charleston, SC

The New-Jersey Gazette (1777-1786), Burlington, NJ

The New-York Gazette, and the Weekly Mercury (1775-1782), New York, NY

The Pennsylvania Packet, and General Advertiser (1773-1783), Philadelphia, PA

Additional titles added to Chronicling America from our state partners include: 

California Eagle (Los Angeles, CA), 1879-1966

Women’s Chronicle (Little Rock, AR), 1888-1893

San Antonio Light (San Antonio, TX) 1881-1993

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 !

Some recent highlights include The Lost Lodge gold, Prehistoric philosophy: the Neolithic revolution, the indigenous critique, and the myths of civilization, Quick hits for creativity in the classroom : successful strategies from award-winning teachers, Focus: how to study in an increasingly distracted world, and Tu pasaporte a México.

And some seasonal additions to Stacks include Celebrate Memorial Day, Flowers and plants, NBA’s top 10 playoff upsets, and Star Wars: the triumph of nerd culture.

Please reach out to a librarian at ask.loc.gov with questions about accessing these materials using Stacks.