William Jacobs has been appointed chief of the Interpretive Programs Office (Interpretive Programs Officer).
Jacobs earned advanced degrees in art history and in architecture and industrial design from the University of Minnesota and the Rhode Island School of Design, respectively.
As an exhibition designer for the Smithsonian Institution for nearly three decades, he has designed exhibitions ranging in size from small traveling displays to major permanent galleries. As the chair of the Exhibits Design Division at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM), he was responsible for planning and designing all exhibitions. This included the 250,000-square-foot Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, which is the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s annex at Washington Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Va.
The Interpretive Programs Office presents the Library of Congress’s incomparable collections to the general public in an intellectually and visually compelling manner. More than 1,500 exhibitions on almost as many subjects have been mounted since the early 1940s. Many of these have been viewed locally, nationally and internationally either on-site, through the Library’s traveling exhibition program, or on its websites at www.loc.gov/exhibits/ and myLOC.gov.
