James Thompson, an undergraduate summer intern at the Library of Congress, has featured the materials that LOC curator Nanette Gibbs curated over eight years concerning arithmetic all around the world. He writes in a delightful post about his summer,.

• My first task was to assist in the curation and creation of materials for a series of Teacher’s Workshops in which the Hispanic Reading Room would participate. I was presented with a depth of materials that Nanette had curated over eight years concerning arithmetic all around the world, each book shaped by the language and culture for which it was produced. These books went largely untouched for about half a century, and our job was to make them useful and exciting to modern educators. Here, Nanette urged me to think contextually – imploring me to step outside of our division or just the collection we had gathered, and instead make use of the depth of information that we have in the multiple research divisions. Diving headfirst into the collection, we were able to find a plethora of materials that could serve as aids to Spanish language learners as well as students learning English as a second language. Reviewing the books, we found that many of the word problems corresponded to goals set by state standards of education, and even SAT practice problems in books meant for elementary age students.
  
  Still, we thought there could be more, so we sought to, once again, think contextually, and remembered the counting songs of our youth – “One potato, two potato, three potato, four” and jump rope rhymes that counted how many doctors it would take to revive Cinderella after her mistaken romantic encounter with a snake. So, we went downstairs from the Hispanic Reading Room to the American Folklife Center where their team was eager and knowledgeable about finding some materials that could aid us in our search. To our luck, their collections contain multitudes of children’s games from over the ages and throughout the world – many of them having to do with elements of counting in various intervals. We were even able to find recordings made in my home-state of Texas during the early 1930s of Spanish counting songs!