In a rare piece of good news this week out of Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress announced it had restored access to its Web sites. They had gone dark, along with many other federal agencies’ sites, because of the government shutdown. Many scholars and researchers rely on the library’s sites for access to its vast collections.

“The library has restored access to all sites in addition to our legislative-information sites,” the library said in a brief statement posted online on Thursday. “Other legislative-branch agencies, and many executive-branch agencies with information functions similar to the library, are granting public access as well.”