ResourceBlog Article: Library of Congress Summer Interns Go Treasure Hunting!

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Thursday, 27th July 2006

Library of Congress Summer Interns Go Treasure Hunting!

From a news release:

Twenty-five college students from across the nation surveyed segments of the Library's nonbook collections and identified unique items by working closely with Library staff and curators in the Copyright Office; Manuscript Division; Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division; Music Division; Prints and Photographs Division; Rare Book and Special Collections Division; Special Materials Cataloging Division; and Geography and Map Division. Their work builds upon the contributions of last year's class of summer interns who similarly unearthed treasures among the Library's Copyright deposits.

More than 100 previously uncataloged items in the Library's collections that were acquired through the historic copyright registrationand deposit system were found. These include:

+ An 1870 theater program copyrighted by Edwin Booth, proprietor of Booth?s Theatre in New York and brother of President Lincoln's slayer, John Wilkes Booth
+ A 1900 blueprint for a proposed expansion of the White House
+ Early 20th century photographs of baseball great Cy Young and team photos of the Cubs and White Sox (ca. 1906)
+ A 1916 play script for "See America First," by composer Cole Porter and his college roommate
+ A 1957 film clip of actress Gloria Swanson on ?The Steve Allen Show?
+ Musical score for the 1968 film "Planet of the Apes" by award-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith
+ Audio recordings reflective of contemporary American pop culture

The copyright registration and deposit system was centralized in the Library of Congress by an Act of Congress approved by President Ulysses S. Grant on July 8, 1870. Since that historic day, more than 32 million works of authorship -- most of which represent forms of creativity that are uniquely American -- have been registered for copyright protection. In addition to researching the actual deposit copies submitted to the Library of Congress for registration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, interns in the U. S. Copyright Office, Manuscript Division and the Library's Rare Book and Special Collections division have also been reviewing thousands of handwritten applications submitted by the copyright applicants. This rare and unique chronological record of creativity, spanning the period from 1870 to the early 1900s, has yielded many unique descriptions of works registered for Copyright by Americans from all walks of life.

The Junior Fellows Summer Intern Program is a joint project of the U.S. Copyright Office, Library Services, Office of Workforce Diversity, Human Resources Services and the Office of the Chief Financial Officer. The program is made possible through the generosity of the late Mrs. Jefferson Patterson.

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