Library of Congress Webinar

On November 15 (Thursday), I participated in an online webinar that was an orientation to the collections of the Library of Congress. It was an hour long and incredibly informative.  Some of the highlights:

The LOC acquires items by copyright deposit, by gift or by purchase.  If one submits something for copyright, one copy is deposited with the LOC. There is an astounding number of items in the library's collections:
151.7 million (M) items; 31.4 M primary source files; 22.7 M cataloged books; 66.6 M manuscripts; 5.4 M maps; 13.3 M photos, 6.4 M sheet music files; 3.4 M audio files; 1.3 M moving pictures

Many of these items are available to view and/or download from the library's web page.  For help with exploring these materials, there is a button on the home page to the "Ask a Librarian" anchor page which has links to ask for help by a list of categories.  The links take you to just the right person to help with your specific query.

One useful page is Read.gov which contains literacy resources for librarians.

The Researchers page has an overview of the collections (general, specific format or international collections), a link to the LOC collection policies (with downloadable pdf files), links to collection resources, and links to off-site resources, to name just a few. From this page, one can access the State Memory Projects, which have links to resources at the state level.

From the Digital Collections & Services: In addition to the 9 featured items on the LOC's home page, the anchor page has a complete list of all the digitized collections.  The most helpful to the genealogist are:
American Memory collection: highlights from American history, linking to primary documents, photos, exhibits and more.
Chronicling America features selected historic newspapers which are browsable and downloadable from the library's collection.
Most interesting is the Map collections of the library, with maps from 1500-2004.  From the anchor page, select the category of interest to locate maps to add to and enhance your family history.

For the next week (at least), I will be exploring the LOC's collections, with an emphasis on the North Carolina records of Robeson County, the home of our immigrant ancestor, Dougal McLauchlin.
I will share what I find on this blog, especially anything that adds to the information originally included in JennieV Wier's book, McLauchlins.