Of Springfield, Virginia, passed away on Friday, September 21, 2012 at his residence. Beloved husband of Donna Belle Goodrum; devoted father of Christopher Kent Goodrum of California, Julia Belle (Peter) Freitag of Wake Forest, NC and Geoffrey Paul Goodrum of Alexandria, VA; loving grandfather of Gregory, Rachel and Tristan Freitag. He received degrees from Wichita University and Columbia University. Following graduation, he was hired by the Library of Congress and became the librarian of its Congressional Research Service. In ensuing years, he became the CRS's Director of Research, and later the Director of the Office of Planning and Development for the Library as a whole until retirement.
Really impressive and well written, with excellent photographs. It's like getting a personal tour of some of the wonderful holdings, from documents to film to music. Goodrum chooses examples to explain how the larger collections work, for example, discussing the musical Oklahoma to talk about the holdings of composers and playwrights. I thought it was just going to be your basic coffee table book, but it was much more engrossing and thoughtful.
Enjoyed it. I actually only read the first few chapters, then scanned the rest and looked at all the pictures :-). I loved the chapters on the history of the Library and the rare book collection (which also has a mini-history of books since it talks about papyrus scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, Gutenberg bible, etc.). I also read the "Oklahoma!" chapter, which is a case study about how to use the Library's collection to deeply research a single topic using their full array of resources.
It's in Washington, US. It was built in 1800. Owns 30mil of books from 470 languages around the world in its catalog. About 3624 librians lead by H. Bilington. Library of Congress was in film National Treasure 2.