The Library of Congress has acquired and made available online the Omar Ibn Said Collection, which includes the only known surviving slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States. In 1831, Omar Ibn Said, a wealthy and highly educated man who was captured in West Africa and brought to the United States as a slave, wrote a 15-page autobiography describing his experiences.

Read more about the extraordinary Omar Ibn Said Collection.

Women's Suffrage in Sheet Music

The Library of Congress just released Women's Suffrage in Sheet Music, a selection of more than 200 pieces of sheet music spanning the years 1838-1923, over half of which highlight women's emerging voices and suffrage efforts. The collection includes published rally songs and songsters written and compiled by notable composers and suffragists, as well as music manuscripts submitted for copyright deposit by everyday citizens. Anti-suffragists raised voices in song as well, and popular music of the era echoed anti-suffrage sentiments of the day with specific references to the movement. Read more and browse the entire collection or take a quick look at the fascinating cover art. 

Joe Smith Collection

The Joe Smith Collection provides recordings of interviews conducted by Smith, a retired music executive, between 1986 and 1988, with musicians, producers, and other music industry icons. He spoke with everyone from Aerosmith to Yoko Ono about different genres of music, the industry, and how it had changed. The contributors are a virtual who’s who from the mid-to-late 20th century and the discussions provide a glimpse behind the curtain.

Lowell Folklife Project

The Lowell Folklife Project from the American Folklife Center (AFC) is the fifth of AFC’s ethnographic field projects to be digitized in full and presented online. The collection is the result of a year-long study conducted between 1987-1988 by AFC fieldworkers. The collection documents contemporary ethnic neighborhoods, occupations, and community life related to the history of industrialization in Lowell, Massachusetts. So much rich material: French, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Greek, Cambodian, Irish, Polish, Laotian, Vietnamese and Italian communities; work, weddings, sports, parades and festivals; music, winemaking, teens hanging out, and Jack Kerouac’s birthplace are all here.

The papers of suffragist and political strategist Carrie Chapman Catt, including her time as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, have been digitized and are now available online for the first time from the Library of Congress.

The collection includes about 9,500 items dating primarily from 1890 to 1920 as Catt helped lead the fight for a federal suffrage amendment. The Catt Papers are online at: loc.gov/collections/carrie-chapman-catt-papers/about-this-collection/.

Click here for more information.

In celebration of the Persian New Year, also known as Nowruz, the Library of Congress has digitized and made available online for the first time the Rare Persian-Language Manuscript Collection, which sheds light on scientific, religious, philosophical and literary topics that are highly valued in the Persian speaking lands.

This collection, including 150 manuscripts with some dating back to the 13^th century, also reflects the diversity of religious and confessional traditions within the Persian culture.

From the 10^th century to the present, Persian became the cultural language for a large region stretching from West Asia to Central and South Asia. Today, Persian is the native language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and some regions of Central and South Asia and the Caucasus.

Click here for more information.

Just in time for the 100^th anniversary of Children’s Book Week, Children's Book Selections brings together a sampling of digitized children’s books, including rare and beloved titles, that reflect three general themes: Learning to Read, Reading to Learn, and Reading for Fun. The presentation includes both classic works that are still read by children today, and lesser-known treasures drawn from the Library’s extensive collection of historically significant children’s books. It is accompanied by a new guide to help researchers find historical children’s materials on the Library’s web site: Children's Book Selections: Resource Guide

The Library of Congress Web Archiving Program has updated the United States Elections Web Archive to release content archived during the 2016 U.S. Elections, as well as some campaign websites from special elections in 2015 and 2017. As with prior election releases, this release contains campaign sites archived weekly prior to the elections, documenting sites associated with presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections. The sites archived in this collection typically include social media channels as well, in order to provide a fuller representation of how candidates presented themselves via the Internet to the electorate.

Author Colleen Jones focuses on using brand presence to build online loyalty in new Peachpit title.

Innovative Training Resources for Final Cut Pro X Software - Peachpit Launches New Books and Videos, Including Apple Certified Series, Now Available to Pre-Order

Peachpit Launches MyGraphicsLab - Innovative New Learning Solution Prepares Students for Design Careers

New Book and eBook Reveal Everything Photographers Need to Know to Capture the Big Day

Digital Discounts Offered to Help Mark Anniversary

New Peachpit Release Shows How to Create Designs that Appeal to a Worldwide Audience

Scott Kelby Is Top-Selling U.S. Photography Book Author for 2011 - Peachpit Author Leads in Photography Book Sales, According to Nielsen Bookscan Data

Scott Kelby Is Top-Selling U.S. Photography Book Author for 2012 - Peachpit Author Leads in Photography Book Sales, According to Nielsen Bookscan Data

Peachpit Publishes Rise of the DEO

“My purpose in writing this book is rooted in a desire to share, on a human level, some of the moments in my life that have significance to me as a photographer, and as a man.” — Dan Winters

Adobe Press Publishes Third Edition of Best-Selling Book by Erik Spierkermann

Peachpit Author Leads in Photography Techniques Book Sales, According to Nielsen Bookscan Data

Peachpit Publishes GoPro: Professional Guide to Filmmaking

Peachpit Author Leads in Photography Techniques Book Sales, According to Nielsen BookScan Data

Peachpit Author Sixth Consecutive Year Honoree

The hidden modal window technique is a great solution for dealing with interface elements which are not particularly necessary on the page. Social networks can use modal windows for private messages and forms which are only being used by members of the site. This is also true for blogs and magazines which have an author […]

A quick Google search will yield plenty of handy autocomplete plugins — there’s even an option shared by jQuery UI which comes bundled with the library. However today I want to look into an alternative solution. The jQuery Autocomplete plugin released by DevBridge has the exact functionality that I find most appealing. The styles will […]

Recently, I’ve have seen a number of websites using this JavaScript-powered paged document interface. Users are presented a multi-page document set starting on the first page, and they have the ability to switch between pages dynamically. This can be a much better solution than linking directly to a PDF document. Or this may even be […]

When building your own WordPress theme, there are a number of items to consider. One such page element is a dynamic image gallery, either using a lightbox or some type of sliding panel. Both of these user interfaces mesh nicely into the content of an article. Since they can both work on typical websites it […]

The typical process of creating a dynamic feed listing requires some type of backend language. Obviously this can work out fine if you are familiar with Rails or PHP, but I want to present a method for pulling RSS feeds via jQuery. The problem is accessing Ajax requests from an external server and then converting […]

Tooltips are awesome, there’s simply no denying it. They provide a simple, predictable and straightforward way to provide your users with useful, context-sensitive information, and they look cool to boot. We all agree on how great tooltips are, but how we go about implementing them can differ dramatically. If you’re at square one, looking for […]

Many new online web services are providing backend APIs for developers. These allow anyone to connect into a web app and pull out specific information (or push or change bits of data). Today we’re specifically looking at the API for Imgur. In this tutorial I want to demonstrate how we can remotely mirror an image […]

When constructing a simple webpage, it can often make sense to fit the content into a single layout rather than multiple pages. These single-page websites are beneficial when you have a small project or portfolio which needs some online presence. If you split up content into neat sections, then visitors might use a small sliding […]

Web browsers can generate unique sessions organized for each user on a website. Often these are handled on the backend using languages like PHP or Ruby, but we can also utilize cookie sessions on the frontend with Javascript. There are many tutorials out there explaining how to generate pure JS cookies. But a newer library […]

Mobile app interfaces have been utilizing on/off sliding switches for a while. These are most commonly found on the settings page where users can update preferences for their account. But web designers have taken notice and have built many open platforms to generate your own on/off switch sliders. In this tutorial I want to look […]

Signup forms are all too common when building new web applications or social networks. Traction from user signups can really boost your own self-confidence about a project when it comes to launching a new website. But what can you do to help improve the signup experience and hopefully gain more interested users? In this tutorial […]

Animated GIF images are popular on the Internet because they can be easily shared and consumed rather quickly. Using basic HTML you can embed images into a page which feature animation, without relying on any other technologies. Granted – there are plugins for animating sprites or backgrounds – but GIFs are a totally different concept. […]

Many portfolio websites include a list of previous clients to build trust from other potential customers. Reading what other people have said about a service or product is one way to garner support from visitors who have never heard about your company before. (Of course, this design technique only works if you have previous clients […]

I’ve always been intrigued by the Instagram phenomenon and how quickly it rose to popularity. Photo filters are nothing new but dynamic use of these filters has not always been possible. Building the functionality into an iOS/Android application requires a lot of time. Thankfully developers have worked to replicate this process for the web using […]

Everyone loves a cool little loading animation, right? But if that divot lasts more than a second or two, it only brings attention to the fact that the website is loading slowly. And that’s a website killer. Users expect websites to load quickly and efficiently. It’s your job to ensure that the design is not […]

Updates to the Chrome Developer Tools: CSS property quick search, memory stats for heap snapshots, CodeMirror upgrade and more.

Take advantage of the new element and new features of in your next responsive website.

Using CSS Shapes we can create experiences that we have never been able to create on the web before.

Learn how North Kingdom built an immersive multimedia experience optimized for modern mobile browsers using Web RTC

Service Worker will revolutionize the way we build for the web. Learn about what it is, why it is important and how to use it.