March 24, 2008 Iraq's Reconstruction and Renewal is Subject of March 27 Symposium

Iraq is entering a period of development in the areas of education, health care and the national economy. Many organizations—both governmental and non-governmental— are working to facilitate Iraq’s rebuilding. Representatives from these organizations will discuss their efforts in Iraq at a conference to be held at the Library of Congress from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursday, March 27, in room 119, located on the first floor of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street S.E., Washington D.C. Sponsored jointly by the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division, the John W. Kluge Center and the Embassy of Iraq’s Cultural Office, with support from the Raja Sidawi Fund for Islamic Studies, the conference is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required. Organizations participating in the symposium include the U.S. Department of State; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and the Institute of Medicine; the Office of Iraq Reconstruction (USAID); the International Organization for Migration; AMIDEAST; Life for Relief and Development; International Relief and Development; World Learning and the Mobile Medical International Corp. 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. The African and Middle Eastern Division furthers this mission as the Library’s center for the study of some 78 countries and regions from Southern Africa to the Maghreb and from the Middle East to Central Asia. The division’s Near East Section holds many works about Iraq written in Arabic by Iraqi scholars and authors. For more information on the division and it holdings, visit www.loc.gov/rr/amed/. Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.