BUILDING A NATION OF READERS:
OPENING REMARKS

I am Diane Kresh, Director for Public Service Collections at the Library of Congress and am delighted to be welcoming so many new young scholars to the Library of Congress. This is an historic occasion for the Library of Congress as it is the first time so many of you have been invited to a program during which we can introduce you to the writings of authors from our collections. The Library of Congress has over 115 million items in its collections so it was hard to choose which items to share with you today. We were lucky in that we have a very talented staff of curators and specialists who select materials for our collections and make it their life's work to know as much about a subject as possible. Four of them are with us today. Over the past few months, we have been working with your teachers to design a series of programs which we hope will not only introduce you to the Library of Congress but will encourage you to be life long readers, learners and supporters of libraries, wherever you are. In the words you will hear this morning and the images you see displayed, you will begin to get a sense of what some famous and some not so famous Americans thought about religious freedom, slavery, and what it means to get an education, rights and privileges that some of us today may take for granted but what people and students not much older than you are had to fight for. You will also hear about by gone occupations, like the village blacksmith, and observations of everyday life which may inspire you to keep your own journals and write down what you think, feel, and see so that future generations of boys and girls like yourselves can experience what it meant to be alive at the end of the 20th century. I can think of no better place to experience history than within the walls of the Library of Congress listening to voices of the past and the not so distant past voices that seek to explain, and describe -- voices full of hope and expectation. For it is through such voices and the words they share with us that we can begin to know the writers better and, through their experiences, know ourselves .

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