Treasures of the Library of Congress
Exhibition to Open in 1997 with Grant from the Xerox Foundation
Dr. Billington recently announced that the Library will open "Treasures of the Library of Congress" in the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building in the spring of 1997, the centennial year of the building.
"Treasures" will be a permanent exhibition of 200 of the Library's rarest and most significant items from the vast American music, literary, historical, photographic, fine arts and geographic collections. The rotating exhibition will be on display in the Great Hall through the year 2000, the 200th anniversary of the Library of Congress.
The Librarian announced that the preservation and exhibition of the treasures are made possible by a grant of $1.1 million from the Xerox Foundation, the largest single contribution for an exhibition that the Library has ever received.
Dr. Billington thanked Xerox, saying, "This generous grant ensures the physical preservation and public display of such priceless treasures as Jefferson's handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence, the first and second drafts of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and hundreds of manuscripts, books, prints, photographs, maps and music which represent the variety and vitality of American creativity.
"Works from George Gershwin, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and many others will be preserved for, and seen by, millions of visitors to Washington and millions more electronically," he added. "In fact, today marks the inauguration of the digital version of the four recently recovered notebooks of Walt Whitman on the World Wide Web (see LC Information Bulletin, April 17) another milestone in our efforts to create a national digital library."
Dr. Billington said the Xerox grant will provide state-of-the-art display cases to house the most valuable items as well as funds to equip existing display cases with the latest in environmental and security controls. The grant will also be used to fund interpretive technology that will enhance the visitors' experience. Descriptive text and a variety of electronic images will enable the visitor to explore more deeply the history and significance of the items on display.
"Treasures" will also be available on the Internet, joining the Library's eight other major exhibitions now available electronically to millions worldwide.
Paul A. Allaire, chairman of the Board and chief executive officer of Xerox and president of the Xerox Foundation, said, "Throughout our nation's history, it has been the document -- the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address -- that has shaped our thoughts and recorded our progress in the course of human events. These documents, both historic and artistic, speak eloquently long after those who brought them to life are gone. When we walk through this magnficent exhibit, the rich words and images created so long ago still have deep meaning and are still speaking to us; we just have to listen."
Xerox is a global company offering document processing products designed to make offices around the world more productive. It has headquarters in Stamford, Conn.
Reopening of Thomas Jefferson Building. The "Treasures" exhibition will mark the official reopening of the Jefferson Building, which has been under renovation since 1984. The massive project, restoring and modernizing what has often been called "the most beautiful building in America," is being completed in several phases by the Architect of the Capitol. The Main Reading Room was reopened to the public in 1991; guided tours of the Great Hall were reinstituted in 1993 when the exhibition "Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture" was on display in the Great Hall and are now offered four times daily on weekdays.
In the fall of 1996, a new docent program will enable the Library to enlarge its guided tour program to take visitors on "previews" of the completed spaces. Other events in 1996 in the Jefferson Building will include an event to honor Congress for its support of the restoration and an exhibition entitled "Frank Lloyd Wright: Shaping the American Landscape, 1920-1930."
In the spring of 1997, the public will be invited to a national celebration to mark the building's official reopening and 100th birthday. In addition to the "Treasures" exhibition, the Xerox Foundation is also underwriting these special weekend festivities. Among the events planned for 1997:
- Performances on Neptune Plaza featuring singers and bands performing music from the Library's vast collections of folk and classical music.
- Visits to special areas -- never before open to the public -- including the Gershwin Room, which will house the piano on which George and Ira composed songs as well as other memorabilia from their careers.
- Special guided tours of the architecture, painting and sculpture that make the Jefferson building the most elaborately decorated in America.
- "Jefferson, Knowledge and Democracy," an exhibition in the splendid Pavilion of Arts and Sciences of the Great Hall, with items from Jefferson's library to illustrate how his ideas influenced a fledgling Republic and the world.
The "Treasures" Exhibition. The "Treasures" exhibition will explore the significance of the American past and will offer visitors a unique chance to experience two of America's richest cultural legacies, the collections of the Library of Congress and the Thomas Jefferson Building.
The items on display will be selected from the Library's unparalleled collections in all formats and will include the rarest and most significant treasures in the Library's collections. Because of preservation considerations, some of the more fragile documents will be displayed on a rotating basis.
