Send a message about your love of your research

DMV Academics: Think about working in the Library of Congress this winter break. It would send an important message about the importance of the collections and the reading rooms to your research. Right now the emphasis at the LoC is on realizing the dreams of visitors to have a LoC library card (to empower and bring joy to the pro-library constituency in the US) and to have events for visitors (Thursday night dance parties, etc.). The 19th and 20th Century collections (of books, newspapers, personal manuscripts, etc) on an international scale are amazing thanks to the Cold War, as well as their electronic journal and manuscript collections available only on site. 

I am regularly in the European Reading Room, which is warmer than the Main Reading Room, and all the readings rooms (well, periodicals isn't as much) are spectacularly beautiful. The Hispanic Room has been reorganized with cute nooks and different kinds of places to read, write, and think wonderful thoughts.

Here is the info on renewing your card, which is speedy especially on Mondays: https://loc.gov/rr/

The Library of Congress is great

This summer I have spent nearly every weekday in the Library of Congress' European Reading Room, and it is wonderful. First, I have had access to an immense array of books and articles for my academic writing and, more recently, for my syllabus creating. I have no idea how other academics get access to all these works, including both very obscure works from other countries, in foreign languages, and the newest mainstream books. For example, last week, within minutes, I received at my desk Denise M. Lynn's Claudia Jones: Visions of a Socialist America, which came out late last fall with Polity Press. My university doesn't have a copy of it. In the DMV, only Georgetown University has a copy, and it's a hard copy. This lack of access to books will only get worse as our universities are cutting library budgets. Also earlier this year I was reading copies of the Yugoslav journal Financije, which no university in the DMV has. I could wait for weeks to get my university to order volumes through Inter-Library Loan, but why? I can just sit down at my desk in the LoC reading room and have them brought to me, as many volumes as I like. 

Yesterday, I said hi to a historian of Russia and said that I had been here nearly every day all summer, "Isn't this great?" He said, "I love it. What can I say?" Pure joy in the Library of Congress.

What is Stacks? Is it great?

Well, for some time now, I have been looking up books and not finding them in the Library of Congress catalog or there is this link to Stacks. Sitting in the European Reading Room working on my laptop, I have tried to use this Stacks thing to find e-books, and it never worked. I've found out that you can only access e-books at the Library of Congress on one terminal in each reading room. There is no real problem with getting access at this one terminal because 1) no one seems to know about Stacks and 2) you would have to move and sit at a terminal to read the e-book. Here is where the Stacks link is:

As the Library of Congress states, "Briefly, Stacks is a software platform developed at the Library of Congress to render and enable access to materials that can only be made accessible on dedicated reading room terminals." I suppose that this means that over 100,000 e-books only available on solo terminals have replaced what would have been physical books. At university libraries and the public libraries, you can check out and read e-books wherever you want in the reading room/library or elsewhere. 

Stacks seems sort of sad.