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Library Experts

  • Katherine Blood

    Katherine Blood is the curator of fine prints in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress. She works with students, teachers, scholars, creators and the general public in exploring the Library’s stellar collection of over 60,000 fine prints created by such artist/printmakers as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Utagawa Hiroshige, Robert Blackburn, Ester Hernandez and Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith. Specializing in modern to contemporary prints by American artists, Blood has a longstanding interest in art engaged with poetry, as reflected in her related Poetry & Literature blog posts and short videos with Juan Felipe Herrera for his Poet Laureate project, "La Casa de Colores." Blood’s recent exhibitions and publications include "Art in Action" and "Cherry Blossoms: Sakura Collections from the Library of Congress" (Smithsonian Books, in association with the Library of Congress).

  • Candice Buchanan

    Candice Buchanan is a reference librarian at the Library of Congress, specializing in local history and genealogy. As a teenager in search of a haunted mausoleum, she discovered her ancestors’ tombstones. Devoted to and fascinated by family history ever since, she works with patrons to develop research strategies, locate records and get the most out of every detail in order to tell their ancestors’ stories. For the Library, Candice has developed guides that address state-specific research, women’s history and family photographs, as well as a series about heirship schemes and fabricated histories that lead researchers astray. Prior to joining the Library, she worked as a genealogist and archivist for Memory Medallion, Inc., Genealogists.com and the Orphans’ Court at the Greene County, Pennsylvania Courthouse.

  • Sheree Budge

    Sheree Budge is a reference librarian at the Library of Congress specializing in local history and genealogy. She has studied genealogy and researched her own families’ stories all her adult life. As part of her librarian duties, she provides research orientations about using the Library of Congress collections to answer genealogy questions and provides research strategy consultations upon request. She is descended from farmers, confectioners, patent medicine salesmen, tailors, needlepickers and the man who fell off the Mayflower (John Howland).

  • Mark Dimunation

    Mark Dimunation was appointed chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress in 1998. As chief, Dimunation is responsible for the development, interpretation and management of the Rare Book Collection, the largest collection of rare books in North America. He acquires materials, develops programs of lectures and presentations, and oversees the operations of the division. He specializes in 18th- and 19th-century English and American printing and has considerable experience working with antiquarian materials as well as fine press and contemporary artists’ books. He is particularly interested in the intersection of art and literature, and has had the privilege of building collections exploring this theme at Berkeley, Stanford and Cornell before coming to the Library of Congress. The Rare Book Division is home to one of the largest artists’ book collections in the country, along with substantial collections of literature and poetry, such as the Poets Laureate Collection and the Archives of the St. Marks Poetry Project.

  • Sara W. Duke

    Sara W. Duke is the curator of popular and applied graphic art in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. She came to the Library in 1991 as a Junior Fellow — and happily stayed. She has curated and co-curated several exhibitions of cartoon art at the Library of Congress, including “Blondie Gets Married” (1998), “Cartoon America” (2006), “Herblock!” (2009), “Comic Art” (2019) and “Geppi Gems” (2021). She has also been curating the Herblock Gallery since 2011. In addition to acquiring cartoon art for the Library, Duke oversees historical prints, illustration and ephemera (which includes the Library’s baseball card collections).

  • Megan Halsband

    Megan Halsband is a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division at the Library of Congress. She started at the Library of Congress in 2008 and has been working with the Library’s comic book collection for almost 10 years; she is one of the Library’s subject matter experts for this collection. She helped established the Library’s comic-related web archive collections, and is passionate about bringing the collection to new audiences.

  • John A. Saint Amour

    John A. Saint Amour serves as assistant section head for the Information Section at the U.S. Copyright Office. His role within the Office of Public Information and Education is to collaborate with office leadership in promoting the importance of copyright by seeking new, innovative ways to help better serve members of the public. John studied music education and conducting at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, and George Mason University where he was a Teaching Fellow and inducted into Pi Kappa Lambda and the National Music Honor Society.

  • Shelly Smith

    Shelly Smith is the head of Book Conservation at the Library of Congress. She has advanced education and training as a conservator of rare books, and has worked as a rare book conservator at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens and was the head of conservation at the New York Public Library. At the Library of Congress, she leads the conservation teams responsible for preparing collections for digitization and for caring for the Library’s National Treasures.

  • Stephanie Stillo

    Stephanie Stillo serves as the curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection and Aramont Library in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division (RBSCD) of the Library of Congress. Before joining the Library, Stephanie was the Mellon Fellow for Digital Humanities at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and is a steadfast advocate for digital scholarship at the Library of Congress. Stephanie researches the intersection of text and the graphic arts as they relate to book illustration. She has written several blog posts and articles about the Library’s rare book collections and recently created an award-winning story map about RBSCD’s 15th-century books, titled “INCUNABULA: The Art and History of Printing in Western Europe.” Stephanie is currently writing a book, titled “From Wood, Metal, and Stone: 500 Years of Book Illustration in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection.”