The Library of Congress has turned 4,000 square feet on the ground floor of its Thomas Jefferson Building into a research room designed for a group that rarely gets its own federal reading space: children and teenagers.
The Source: Where Curiosity Sparks Discovery opened May 9 and is designed especially for visitors ages 8 to 15, along with families and school groups. A new July/August Library of Congress Magazine feature shows the finished gallery and explains how its interactive stations are meant to make research feel like an active hunt rather than a formal assignment.
A card catalog that opens into the collections
The room's most recognizable object is an animated card catalog. Opening its drawers can trigger collection-based scenes, including the tornado from The Wizard of Oz, a rocket launch and Rosa Parks' pancake recipe. The device uses the shape of an old research tool to introduce material held in many formats.
Elsewhere, seven Library staff members appear in short videos at a research desk, describing their work and suggesting items to explore. A large digital Source Book lets visitors assemble and share a collage from collection images, making their own trail through what they found.
The Library says the room contains hundreds of digitized and replica items spanning image, film, sound and text collections. The use of reproductions is important: young visitors can manipulate and compare material without putting fragile originals at risk.
The Source also treats research as a conversation. Staff and volunteers run scheduled Source Spotlight demonstrations, and a free Source Guide gives families a structure for a self-directed visit. The Library recommends allowing 30 to 45 minutes, though the gallery is built to support different paths rather than one fixed sequence.
Designed with a youth advisory council
The design was not produced only for young people; children helped shape it. The Library convened a youth advisory council of about two dozen children ages 8 to 12 in fall 2021. They reacted to early designs, tested ideas and offered blunt feedback about what felt inviting.
Weston Moats, one of those advisers, is pictured in the magazine feature inside the completed gallery. The visible result is a room with saturated orange fixtures, large-scale media and many points of entry—an environment that presents federal collections without mimicking an adult reading room.
Hours, tickets and limits
The gallery is free, but visiting rules still apply. Children under 16 must remain with an adult. During Washington's summer and other school breaks, public hours are Tuesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. During the school year, weekday public hours begin at 1 p.m.; Saturday hours remain 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
School and organized groups can use workshop programs or request free timed-entry tickets for visits during public hours. The Source is immediately to the right of the Jefferson Building's main entrance on the ground floor.
The new room does not make every part of Library research child-accessible, and its displays rely on selected digitized or replica objects rather than open access to the full physical collection. Its more consequential experiment is narrower: whether a national library can teach primary-source habits—asking questions, comparing formats and tracing evidence—before visitors think of research as something reserved for specialists.