How to Protect Art? The US Library of Congress and the Museum of Natural History

The U.S. Library of Congress houses a vast collection of more than 175 million works, including books, art, e-books, ancient scrolls, T.V. shows, and video games. The collection ranges from ancient clay tablets to modern digital information, such as 3D digitised artefacts and patents. In addition to physical media, the library also holds about 184 petabytes of digital information, which is equivalent to 39 million DVDs of data. Some notable artefacts include 2,000-year-old clay tablets from Mesopotamia and 18th-century Iranian prayer scrolls made from gazelle skins.

The Natural History Museum in London has recently opened new urban gardens – the Nature Discovery Garden and the Evolution Garden. These gardens showcase the changing natural world and aim to support urban nature, research, and education. The museum’s main attraction is the skeleton of a diplodocus dinosaur named Fern. This £25 million project is set to become one of the world’s most intensively studied urban nature sites.

The art market is experiencing a crisis, with only one in five artists exhibiting in a museum and global art auctions down 27% in 2023 compared to 2022. Female artists and artists of colour are facing even greater barriers, with female-identifying artists and Black artists in the U.S. accounting for just 5.3% of all art sales from 2008 to 2022, according to the Burns-Halperin report.