LoC Blog: 25 Years of LOC.gov

What does the Library of Congress website have in common with Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, Amazon.com, the TV show “Friends” and Netscape’s first web browser? Give up? They were all born 25 years ago. (If you had other guesses share them in the comments!)
We debuted our website at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Miami on June 22, 1994. By the way, the ALA conference is in Washington, D.C. this week and today we expect thousands of attendees to visit the Library!
Since the launch of loc.gov we have put more of the Library online including U.S. federal legislative information, vital services from the U.S. Copyright Office and millions of items from our collections. It’s hard to pick highlights, but here goes:

Earliest known draft of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
“Migrant Mother” photo
Audio interviews with formerly enslaved people
Papers of Rosa Parks
Fire insurance maps that show the evolution of communities across America
Early motion pictures from Thomas Edison
WPA posters
Rare books
Historical newspapers

Just this year, online additions include the Omar Ibn Said Collection, featuring the only known extant narrative written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the U.S., thousands more public domain books, a collection of rare Persian language materials, the 2016 U.S. Election Web Archive, content exploring women’s suffrage including the papers of Carrie Chapman Catt, a new exhibition and crowdsourcing campaign.
We publish recordings of hundreds of events we host every year. Our curators tell great stories on our blogs and many of those stories are about how you use the Library.
We now receive two million visits each week to Library websites.
Even before the debut of our site in 1994, the Library was connecting with users via the Internet using Gopher, TELNET and File Transfer Protocol (FTP). The loc.gov domain was registered in 1990. Tom Littlejohn, an information technology specialist (who thankfully still works here), sent the first loc.gov e-mail in September 1990.
This is a test message to attempt the first mail message from lc to the outside world via the Internet.
First loc.gov e-mail sent September 7, 1990. Do you know what your first e-mail was?
Nowadays, you don’t have to e-mail Tom if you need help. We have a whole crew of people standing by to answer your questions. You can also connect with us on social media.

June 16, 1997

Very early web archives didn’t consistently capture image content. As you can see, this has improved over the years.

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June 20, 2019

No archive yet for this version of the website!