The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States of America, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in four buildings in Washington, D.C., as well as the Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and number of books. The head of the Library is the Librarian of Congress, currently James H. Billington.

The Library of Congress was instituted for Congress in 1800, and was housed in the United States Capitol for most of the 19th century. After much of the original collection had been destroyed during the War of 1812, Thomas Jefferson sold 6,487 books, his entire personal collection, to the library in 1815. After a period of decline during the mid-19th century the Library of Congress began to grow rapidly in both size and importance after the American Civil War, culminating in the construction of a separate library building and the transference of all copyright deposit holdings to the Library. During the rapid expansion of the 20th century the Library of Congress assumed a preeminent public role, becoming a "library of last resort" and expanding its mission for the benefit of scholars and the American people.

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, designer and inventor. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar.

In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. During this period he also led efforts that would begin the desktop publishing revolution, notably through the introduction of the LaserWriter and the associated PageMaker software.

Christopher "Chris" Hillman (born December 4, 1944 in Los Angeles, California) was one of the original members of The Byrds, which in 1965 included Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, David Crosby and Michael Clarke. With frequent collaborator Gram Parsons Hillman was a key figure in the development of country rock, defining the genre through his work with The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and the country-rock group Desert Rose Band.

Hillman, the third of four children, spent his early years at his family's ranch home in rural northern San Diego County, approximately 110 miles (180 km) from Los Angeles. He has credited his older sister with exciting his interest in country and folk music when she returned from college during the late 1950s with folk music records by The New Lost City Ramblers and others. Hillman soon began watching many of the country-music shows on local television in southern California at the time such as Town Hall Party, The Spade Cooley Show and Cal's Corral. Hillman's mother encouraged his musical interests and bought him his first guitar; shortly thereafter he developed an interest in bluegrass, particularly the mandolin. At age 15 Hillman went to Los Angeles to see the Kentucky Colonels bluegrass band at the Ash Grove, and later convinced his family to allow him to travel by train to Berkeley for lessons from mandolinist Scott Hambly. Around this time, Hillman's father died.

Carole King (born February 9, 1942) is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. King and her former husband Gerry Goffin wrote more than two dozen chart hits for numerous artists during the 1960s, many of which have become standards. As a singer, her Tapestry album topped the U.S. album chart for 15 weeks in 1971, and remained on the charts for more than six years.

She was most successful as a performer in the first half of the 1970s, although she was a successful songwriter long before and long after. She had her first number 1 hit as a songwriter in 1961 at age 18, with "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", which she wrote with Goffin. In 1997, she co-wrote "The Reason" for Aerosmith, but instead it was sung by Celine Dion.

In 2000, Joel Whitburn, a Billboard Magazine pop music researcher, named her the most successful female songwriter of 1955–99, because she wrote or co-wrote 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100.

King has made 25 solo albums, the most successful being Tapestry. Her most recent non-compilation album is Live at the Troubadour, a collaboration with James Taylor, which reached number 4 on the charts in its first week, and has sold over 600,000 copies.

William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man," in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA.

Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 150 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006), and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame (2009). In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 50th anniversary, with Billy Joel positioned at No. 23. With the exception of the 2007 songs "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah," Joel stopped recording pop/rock material after 1993's River of Dreams, but he continued to tour extensively until 2010.