April 14, 2008 Library of Congress and History Announce Multimedia Partnership

Joint Effort Designed to Make Library’s Collections More Broadly Accessible, More Compelling

Contact: Library contact: Matt Raymond (202) 707-0020 | History contact: Michael Feeney (212) 210-1328

The Library of Congress and History have joined forces to create a multimedia partnership to showcase the Library’s collections to the vast audience of the History brands including the History channel, history.com and other television properties. The partnership will also bring historical content to more than 200,000 teachers across the country that use the channel’s branded educational materials in their classrooms.

The announcement was made today by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Abbe Raven, president and CEO of A&E Television Networks. The non-exclusive partnership will include co-branded content on history.com, as well as original specials and short- and long-form historical documentary programming on the History channel. History also produced a short film and new content for the new Library of Congress Experience, which opened publicly April 12 in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building and online at myLOC.gov.

The goal of the partnership is to bring the unparalleled collections of the Library of Congress to broader audiences on the platform of their choice—whether that is mobile, broadband or in high definition on History HD.

“We’re pleased to join forces with History in this effort that will help better fulfill our mission of making knowledge more accessible and useful to the Congress and the public. With more than 138 million items in our collections, there are millions of stories waiting to be told. We’re delighted that History will help us tell some of them,” Billington said.

“This partnership is exciting because it matches the vast resources of the Library of Congress with some the most powerful and trusted brands on the media landscape. It will result in millions of Americans having better access and knowledge of history by utilizing the collections of one of the nation’s greatest institutions,” said Raven.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, is the world’s preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing unparalleled integrated resources to Congress and the American people. Founded in 1800, the Library seeks to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, which bring to bear the world’s knowledge in almost all of the world’s languages and America’s private-sector intellectual and cultural creativity in almost all formats.

History™ and History HD™ are leading destinations for revealing, award-winning, original non-fiction series and event-driven specials that connect history with viewers in an informative, immersive and entertaining manner across multiple platforms. Programming covers a diverse variety of historical genres ranging from military history to contemporary history, technology to natural history, as well as science, archaeology and pop culture. History has earned four Peabody Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, 10 News and Documentary Emmy® Awards and has received the prestigious Governor’s Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the network’s Save Our History campaign dedicated to historic preservation and history education.

###

PR 08-075
2008-04-14
ISSN 0731-3527