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Research at the Library of Congress (LoC)

The Library of Congress is the world's largest library and is located on Capitol Hill in  Washington, DC. Besides books, it contains all kinds of documents, from illustrations, magazines, maps to personal letters. Much of the older material is on microfilm. Photocopying and copying by hand-held cameras is permitted. Scanners are not.

I usually research at LoC for media outlets or academics, but will consider all offers.

Outputs:

How materials are copied depends on their format.  Bound books are best photocopied. I also photocopy magazines, but I find it better to photograph them and other flat documents using a high-resolution camera. Photocopies can be sent directly to the client via regular mail or  scanned  as  PDF files and then text recognized* and e-mailed  to the client or posted to a website.  Photographs are easily posted to a website as is or labeled and they too can be turned into PDF files that can be text-recognized and printed out on any printer, resembling the original in color.

Rates:

I charge $290.00 per day for a  seven hour day.  All photocopying costs are paid for by the client.

* Note:  Searchable text-recognized PDF files are created after the image has been converted into a PDF file using an OCR (optical character recognition) program.  Such files are searchable by many search engines, such as Windows Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search or the search tool that in included with Adobe Acrobat Reader.  These search tools do not work with handwriting and can be imprecise, especially with old documents written with manual typewriters.


Jeremy Bigwood, 3200 16th St. NW #806, Washington, D.C. 20010 T/F: (202) 319-9150; Cell: (202) 361-5000 
bigwood@rcn.com