A reference librarian stumbled across a tiny recording of a speech by Amelia Earhart tucked inside a copy of her 1932 memoir, published soon after she became the first woman (and the second person) to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. The record was just a promotional gimmick at the time; could it still be played, 94 years later? Yes, thanks to the Library's IRENE project, which uses optical imaging to scanned damaged or broken records to reconstruct their sounds on a digital file.

The reading room of the African and Middle Eastern Division — also known as the Pavilion of the Seals — transports visitors across time and continents, immersing them in the late 19th-century United States, classical Greece and Rome and societies that emerged across the globe.

Arthur Sze will serve a second term as the nation’s 25th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2026-2027, the Library announced today, as we highlight National Poetry Month. His newest book, “Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry,” features translations from 13 languages and provides a personal guide to poetry in translation. It will be published today by Copper Canyon Press in association with the Library. Sze will be at the Library on April 14 for a conversation with the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Simon Armitage, on the art and process of writing and translating poetry

The Batak peoples of Sumatra once kept some of their most potent incantations in a book written on bark pages with a cover made of heavy wood. "Instructions for Magical Protection" is one of four Batak manuscripts preserved -- and now ditgitized -- at the Library.

The Library's annual new acquisitions showcase last week was a crowded, noisy, upbeat afternoon of discovery and explanation. Conversations buzzed and overlapped; staff experts and curious viewers leaned over display tables from opposite sides, heads together, talking loudly to be heard, gazing down at maps, manuscripts, records, artifacts and things you couldn’t have known existed.

Hampton Sides, the bestselling author of several books about daring expeditions, including “In the Kingdom of Ice” and “The Wide Wide Sea,” writes this guest essay, in which he argues that to explore is to be human. It's the concluding article in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, "Into the Unknown," about world-changing voyages and discoveries chronicled in the Library's collections.