World Libraries: Library of Congress unveils its new resources for teachers

The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress has launched a new resource that will enable teachers work with primary source documents online on the library’s website (http://www.loc.gov/teachers/) and use them in the classroom. The Manuscript Division is a treasure trove of such source materials, including presidents’ letters, explorers’ journals, notes of scientists and inventors, poets’ manuscripts, ships’ logs, slave narratives, and more. Digitization has made rare, unique and often fragile materials such as these, which once were only accessible to onsite researchers, available for teachers to use in the classroom and for students to study at home.

The Teacher’s page not only provides access to primary source documents, arranged into special thematic blocks, online exhibitions, presentations, but also to extra materials, which will help to effectively organize work with such documents — lesson plans, tools for analyzing sources and many others.