In December 1998, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Library of Congress a grant to support a two-year project to digitize the Hannah Arendt Papers manuscript collection. The staff of the Manuscript Division at the Library administered the project, with assistance from the National Digital Library Program (NDLP) and in cooperation with the New School University in New York City.

The collection was digitized in 1998-2000 through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Initially, some digital content was limited to onsite access through dedicated work stations available only at the Library of Congress, The New School in New York City, and the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. This updated digital presentation of the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress is now available publicly online in its entirety.

Other comedians have maintained their material in joke files, among them Bob Hope, whose file is in the collections at the Library of Congress.

For eight years, the US Library of Congress took it upon itself to maintain a public record of all tweets, but it stopped in 2018, instead selecting only a small number of accounts’ posts to capture.  “It never, ever worked,” says William Kilbride, executive director of the Digital Preservation Coalition. The data the library was expected to store was too vast, the volume coming out of the firehose too great. “Let me put that in context: it’s the Library of Congress. They had some of the best expertise on this topic. If the Library of Congress can’t do it, that tells you something quite important,” he says.

The Joke File has been scanned into an internal database that is accessible on-site in both the Recorded Sound and Moving Image Research Centers.

A Bibliography

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