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The other LOC

For most of us LOC means Line of Control, and for me it conjures up a vision of the India-Pakistan border, with trenches and barbed wire and soldiers manning their posts. And rightly so .. because thats probably the only LOC any of us have heard about.
There is however another LOC .. which does not conjure up images of strife. The US Library of Congress is among the largest libraries in the world, was established over 200 years ago and contains more than a 100 million items, 19 million of which are books..

19 million books!! Thats an eyepopping figure. It has items in more than 450 languages. Many articles on the Library boast that it's acquisition office obtains items from all over the world. More browsing tells us that the library maintains offices overseas to acquire, catalog, preserve, and distribute library and research materials from countries where such materials are essentially unavailable through conventional acquisitions methods. Looking it up .. really surprised me. I came across this page. If I recall correctly Mandar had emailed the link around an year back. The South Asian Literary Recordings Project has captured the readings of prominent South Asian novelists, poets and playwrights in over 20 languages. (Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Gujrathi, Marathi, Kashmiri.. and many more).

The marathi section is decent .. but essentially dissapointed me with total absence of any readings from notable novelist, poet and playwright P L Deshpande. Particularly because he had the knack of narration, and his works spanned such a wide range. I immediately made a request for the same.

Anyways .. if I do visit DC this summer.. will surely try to go and have a look at the LOC.