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An article on sequestration’s impact on the Library of Congress is a good reminder of the importance of archiving the seemingly-trivial.

Often the library will have one of the few remaining or sole copies of something that seemed insignificant when it was registered but becomes important with the flow of time. For example, President Obama’s father wrote a book in the 1960s in Luo, his tribal dialect, to promote adult literacy in Kenya. It was stored and cataloged with little interest after it was contributed by the library’s field office in Nairobi; today it is one of only four known copies.