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WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s not really about the books.President Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of top officials at the Library of Congress and equally sudden attempt to appoint a slate of loyalists as replacements has instead morphed into an enormous fight over the separation of powers, as the White House tries to wrest control of what has for centuries been a legislative institution.It’s a power struggle with potentially vast consequences. The Library of Congress not only stores the world’s largest collection of books but also an office overseeing reams of copyrighted material of untold value. There is a research institute that...

President Trump just abruptly fired top copyright official Shira Perlmutter via email. This comes just a few days after he fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden. The U.S. Copyright Office, which Perlmutter was in charge of, is a branch of the Library of Congress.

President Donald Trump fired Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, on Thursday. Hayden was informed of the president’s decision through an email from Trent Morse, the deputy director of presidential personnel. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately,” the email said. Hayden was appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2016 to serve a 10-year term, which was set to expire next year.

The Star Trek film franchise has thirteen releases spanning 1979 to 2016, but there is one film often held up as the one of the best of the genre, 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. And today the film picked up another major accolade, being named as one of the movies added to the National Film Registry for Preservation by the Library of Congress. Khan preserved for the ages Today, the Library of Congress announced the 25 films being added to the National Film Registry for Preservation for 2024. Films added to the registry are chosen “due to...

Library of Congress apologizes for using “incorrect” pronouns and calling a female “she.”

Grammy-winning pop star and Joe Biden-Kamala Harris surrogate Lizzo played a 200-year-old crystal flute lent to her by The Library of Congress, before proclaiming, “*****, I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s.” Lizzo was on stage at one of her recent concerts, when she was handed a 200-year old flute originally owned by the fourth U.S. president, James Madison.

Julius Franklin Howell (January 17, 1846 - June 19, 1948) joined the Confederate Army when he was 16. After surviving a few battles, he eventually found himself in a Union prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. In 1947, at the age of 101, Howell made this recording at the Library of Congress. Audio has been restored for clarity.

US Capitol was put on lockdown as a man in truck told police he had a bomb The man parked his truck outside of the Library of Congress' Jefferson Building A Facebook live stream appeared to show the man making an anti-government rant and telling Joe Biden 'The South is coming for you' and 'The Revolution is on' He told the camera: 'This is Tannerite. I'm sure they know what it is' In the live stream put on Facebook, the man says: 'I told my wife I’d be home by Sunday, and I’m looking for all my other patriots to...

WASHINGTON (WJLA/AP) — Police were investigating a report Thursday of a possible explosive device in a pickup truck outside the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill and have evacuated the area around the building, two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press.

According to the Associated Press, an explosive may have been located in the vehicle

While special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, some of the key people in creating the Russia-collusion narrative themselves have ties to a foreign nation. Both the Democratic National Committee as well as Fusion GPS—the company hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to research the Trump campaign—were using Ukrainian sources in their efforts to discredit Trump. Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, was a common thread involved in Democratic opposition research efforts into former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Leshchenko, along with Artem Sytnyk, the...

Tom Tryniski isn’t trained as an archivist. Nor does he have ties to any institution or receive much compensation for the many hours he’s spent scanning the microform of local newspapers he orders from libraries. Still, he is devoted to the endeavor. Since his retirement in 1999, he has digitized some forty million newspaper pages and posted them to his website, fultonhistory.com. His collection, at three times the size of the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America archive, is in all likelihood the largest free repository of its kind. But there is more work to be done, Tryniski says. “Do you...

The official US Archiver of Everything Important will start getting selective about saving tweets in 2018. The Library of Congress is getting picky about saving tweets. I'd completely forgotten that in 2010 the Library of Congress had been retroactively gifted the entire archive of public tweets since 2006 and that it had been collecting them since then. Now that the novelty's over, the LOC said on its blog Tuesday it will follow its usual policy of limiting collection to only tweets it deems significant. In a white paper (PDF) issued during the last week of December 2017, the library stated...

Back in March we talked about the decision by the Library of Congress to stop using “offensive terms” like illegal alien to refer to, er… illegal aliens. Shortly thereafter, Republicans in Congress moved to attach language to the pending appropriations bill which would require the Library of Congress to stick to terminology as it exists in current federal law. But since it hasn’t passed yet, the Library is moving forward with the changes and keeping up the debate in the media. (New York Times) “There is no other way to put this: the library has bowed to the political pressure...

Conservative critics of President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Library of Congress were blindsided Wednesday when a key Republican engineered her lopsided confirmation by the Senate despite concerns she is, in the words of one opponent, “an unqualified, far-left progressive.” The Senate voted 74-18 to confirm Carla D. Hayden, who leads Baltimore’s public library system, as the 14th librarian of Congress. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., rushed Hayden’s nomination to the floor even as Blunt’s office declined to answer The Daily Signal’s inquiries Wednesday morning about the status of the nomination. U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote (go to link) All...

The Library of Congress will continue using the term “illegal alien” following Friday’s passage of the annual legislative funding bill. The Library of Congress had proposed changing the term, saying the term “has become pejorative.” Republicans insisted that the library use terms that reflect federal law, and included language maintaining the federal terminology in the funding bill. …

The House voted Friday to order the Library of Congress to keep using the term “illegal alien” to describe those who come to the U.S. without authorization, saying that as long as federal laws written by Congress use those terms, so should their official records-keeper. The library earlier this had proposed changing, saying that despite being used in law, the term had “become pejorative” and needed to be axed. Instead the library said it would use “noncitizen” to refer to illegal immigrants, and “unauthorized immigration” to refer to the broader issue. Republicans revolted against the change, and demanded in the...

The Library of Congress is dropping the terms “illegal alien” and “alien” from its subject headings after a group of college students and the American Library Association protested the words’ usage.

Back in November of last year, Republican staffer Derek Khanna faced a dilemma that, unlike the problems faced by many of his peers in the GOP, had nothing to do with the election. Specifically, Khanna had authored a memo on copyright reform for his then-employers, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) that shot down three “myths of copyright” – that is, that “the purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content,” that “copyright is the free market at work,” and that “the current copyright legal regime leads to the greatest innovation and productivity.” Khanna’s memo was meant to...

The Library of Congress--the worldÂ’s largest repository of knowledge and information--is beginning its multiyear "Celebration of the Book" with an exhibition, "Books That Shaped America," opening June 25. The exhibition is part of a larger series of programs, symposia and other events that explore the important and varied ways that books influence our lives. The "Books That Shaped America" exhibition will be on view from June 25 through Sept. 29 in the Southwest Gallery, located on the second floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C., from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday. This...