Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has announced the appointment of Charles Simic to be the Library’s 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

Simic will take up his duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary series on Oct. 17 with a reading of his work. He also will be a featured speaker at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in the Poetry pavilion on Saturday, Sept. 29, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

After 10 years on display, "American Treasures of the Library of Congress," an unprecedented exhibition of rare and unique items in the nation’s library, will close on Aug. 18.

Audio-visual conservation work by the Library of Congress is taking a giant leap forward as the Library acquires its new Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in a signing ceremony this evening.

The American Council of the Blind (ACB) presented the Robert S. Bray Award to Frank Kurt Cylke, director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), Library of Congress, on July 4, 2007, during the ACB National Convention in Minneapolis.

The Library of Congress has completed a major expansion of its bilingual "France in America" online presentation with the addition of 247 items from its collections. The presentation, at http://international.loc.gov/intldl/fiahtml/, is one of five bilingual presentations in the Library's Global Gateway Web site (http://international.loc.gov/).

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Kay Kaufman Shelemay, an ethnomusicologist from Harvard University, to the Chair of Modern Culture in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

The Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon, administered by the Library of Congress, has selected Ellen Berg and Prudence Peiffer to receive Swann Foundation fellowships for 2007-2008.

The only known copy of the 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemüller, the first map to use the name "America," spent nearly 400 years in obscurity in the library of a castle in southern Germany. Rediscovered in 1901 and purchased by the Library of Congress in 2003, this crown jewel of cartography will be secured in a state-of-the-art encasement and placed on permanent display later this year.

he 2007 National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress and hosted by Mrs. Laura Bush, will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 29, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., between 7th and 14th streets (rain or shine). The festival is free and open to the public.

Published by the U.S. Army and co-authored by Priscilla Offenhauer and David L. Osborne of the Library of Congress’s Federal Research Division (FRD), the new "History of the U.S. Army Battle Command Training Program, 1986–2003" explains the development of this program and its role in U.S. military operations over the past two decades. This organizational history of the BCTP also describes the basic components and methodology of the battle simulation, discussing significant changes to the program since its inception.

Jenna Weissman Joselit, a Princeton University professor who was recently appointed Visiting Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center, is studying the variety of cultural forms in which the Ten Commandments appear in American culture.

The Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) has announced the winners of its national awards for federal librarianship, which recognize the many innovative ways that federal libraries, librarians and library technicians fulfill the information demands of government, business and scholarly communities and the American public.

The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and Target Stores have announced the national and state winners in the 2006–2007 Letters About Literature reading and writing program.

The Library of Congress has announced the newly created post of National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Appointed for a two-year term by the Librarian of Congress, the ambassador will speak to the importance of fiction and nonfiction in the lives of young people. Selected for extraordinary contributions to the world of books for children and teens, he or she will encourage the appreciation of young people’s literature throughout the United States by both personal and media appearances.

Laura E. Campbell, associate librarian for Strategic Initiatives and chief information officer for the Library of Congress, today received the prestigious 2007 EMC Information Leadership Award from the Computerworld Honors Program. The award was presented during the 19th Annual Laureates Medal Ceremony & Gala Awards Evening at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington. For almost two decades, Computerworld Honors has acknowledged those individuals and organizations that have used information technology to benefit society.

The Library of Congress is seeking nominations from publishers for the $10,000 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, which will be presented in the fall of 2007.

Affiliated state centers for the book from California, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana and Maine are the 2007 winners of the Boorstin Award for innovative reading promotion projects, announced John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.

Published by the Library of Congress in association with University of Pennsylvania Press, "The Road to Jerusalem: Pilgrimage and Travel in the Age of Discovery" is a ground-breaking work of scholarship that constructs a historical narrative around the Library’s rich collection of early modern printed books on travel. Author F. Thomas Noonan’s research in this collection sparked this reexamination of an essential component of European history and culture. The text traces the history of early modern pilgrimage to Jerusalem in light of the history of early modern travel in general – travel that was itself renewed and colored by such cultural twists and turns as the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The Veterans History Project, a program of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, presents "The Great War," a tribute to World War I veterans, in a new section of its Web site at www.loc.gov/vets. Rich in personal detail, photographs, journals and letters, "The Great War" provides a virtual tour of some of the most compelling collections in the Veterans History Project archives and features stories of nearly two dozen men and women who served in WWI.

The Library of Congress will receive the works-in-progress manuscript in which Paul Simon worked out the lyrics for his song "Graceland," Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced upon awarding the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song to Simon during a dinner on May 22 in the Great Hall of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building.