Kansas City native Jeanne Drewes has worked for the world’s largest library, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., since 2006, the culmination of a distinguished four-decade career in book preservation. It only has heightened her appreciation for local libraries and their special collections, wellsprings of regional history and genealogy and other materials unique to their areas.

Drewes returns to “my library growing up in KC” to discuss the Library of Congress and the equivalent indispensability of hometown libraries—the books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, and other resources they offer that can’t be found among the 162 million items in the collection of the Library of Congress. A graduate of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, she heads the Binding and Collections Care Division and Mass Deacidification Program at the Library of Congress.