Library of Congress Blog
“Light and liberty go together.”

Last week was one of the busiest (if not the busiest) week I’ve seen since coming to the Library. There was the Library’s presentation of the $1 million Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity. There were a lot of great, new interactive features that came online in the Library of Congress Experience (online and in the Jefferson Building.) There was a meeting of the Library’s private-sector advisory group, the James Madison Council. All of this came in the wake of the opening of the Capitol Visitor Center, which has led to several visitors now entering the Library via the passageway beneath First Street S.E. — a sight that warms my heart every time I see it!

And if that all weren’t enough, our boss, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, got some wonderful recognition in the middle of all of it. Dr. Billington was one of 23 people (and one award made posthumously) to receive the Presidential Citizens Medal, which is the second-highest civilian distinction bestowed by the President behind the Medal of Freedom. (Only about 100 people have received the award since it was established in 1969.)

In comments to staff last week, Dr. Billington was especially gracious in pointing out that the people of the Library of Congress are the ones who help him achieve what he has, in order to make such recognition possible in the first place.

Congrats, Dr. B.!

In January, the Library embarked on something that took the online community by storm. In conjunction with Flickr, we loaded a few thousand images from the Library of Congress’ vast collections and asked the user community to get involved: Give us your tags, your comments, your huddled masses …

We were essentially conducting an experiment to see how crowdsourcing might enhance the quality of the information we are able to provide about our collections, while also finding innovative ways to get those collections out to people who might have an avid interest in them.

As we’ve said again and again, we’ve been bowled over by the response. Now, the Library has released its report on the Flickr pilot. (The full report is here; a summary is here. Both links are PDFs.)

After the jump is an account of some of our findings, as adapted from a piece intended for the Library of Congress Gazette, our in-house newsletter.

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Our very own John Hessler was featured in today’s Washington Post talking about some of the mysteries behind one of the grand-daddies of all maps, the 1507 Martin Waldseemüller World Map, the document that named “America” and one of the Library’s toppest of the top treasures. (OK, we don’t categorize the treasures quite that way, but a $10 million map would be among the “toppest” in my book.)

John will be taking questions during an online chat tomorrow (Nov. 18, 2008) at the Post’s Web site starting at 11 a.m. EST. You can read the chat here after it gets underway or submit your questions in advance.

Had enough of politics yet?  (Who’s that in the back who shouted, “No”?)

If so, you might want to tune into the Charlie Rose Show tonight for “A Conversation with Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate, and Dr. James Billington, Librarian of Congress.”  (I made a brief mention of the taping a couple of weeks ago.)

The show can be seen on your local PBS station.  Times vary; check your local listings.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did — but even more, I hope inspires many more Americans into a love of poetry.

Happy Halloween to all!

There’s no better time to point you to the LOC’s “Wise Guide” for October, which explores how trick-or-treating got started:

The origins of present day “trick-or-treat” date back to the Celtic tradition of offering gifts of fruits and nuts to appease wandering spirits. If not placated, the villagers feared that the spirits would kill their flocks or destroy their property. Others trace “trick-or-treat” to a European custom called “souling.” Beggars would go from village to village begging for “soul cakes” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors.

The Wise Guide includes links to other Halloween-related resources at the Library of Congress.

Exhibits, especially major ones, take a lot of planning, often years’ worth.

There is fund-raising, exhibit design, curatorial work, object selection, conservation, writing the label texts, brochure design, fabrication, mounting, installation … and several other steps that I’m undoubtedly forgetting.

On Feb. 12, we’re opening the major exhibition “With Malice Toward None,” celebrating the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, made possible through the generosity of Union Pacific Corporation.

Even though that’s more than three months away, a lot of those steps have already taken place.

Yesterday, I got a glimpse of just one of the stages in the process. Just hours after objects for the exhibit were delivered to the Conservation Division, I visited our science lab to get an idea of the kind of preparatory work that is done before they’re put on public display.

Conservators of all kinds will be giving the objects various degrees of TLC over the next several weeks. Some documents will be “bathed” or treated to reduce the acidity and slow the decomposition of the ink and paper. Others may be delicately mended. Some pages will be “desilked” — which reverses a preservation process done briefly around the turn of the 20th century whereby a think layer of silk was applied to documents — in favor of modern techniques.

I hope to be able to link to a little more in-depth commentary on this process soon. In the meantime, I snapped a couple of photos with my phone that I wanted to share, and I’ve linked in this post.

The first is a box holding the contents of Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated; the second is the seed-pearl and gold necklace and matching bracelets worn often by Mary Todd Lincoln. The objects came to the Library in the 1930s as a bequest from Lincoln’s granddaughter.

They have been on display at the Library before, but because of conservation requirements, they’re rarely seen by the public. Starting Feb. 12, you will get another such opportunity. Stay tuned for more!

It isn’t unusual for docents like Malcolm O’Hagan to find that they have inspired visitors after a tour of the Thomas Jefferson Building. (I have written about such inspiration before.) It is, after all, one of the great buildings at the heart of one of the great institutions of the world.

But what wasn’t expected was that a visitor would be inspired to set his inspiration down in verse.

A man named Bob Bein recently went on such a tour led by Malcolm and was so moved that he wrote the poem “The Library of Congress” in July 2008. We reproduce it here with Bob’s permission, for which we are grateful:

Oh such grandeur at the temple entrance,
symbolic stone figures flank
majestic marble staircases,
statues with torches blaze the path to wisdom,
skylights brighten layers of understanding.

Truly a temple of knowledge,
human gods of arts and sciences look on
thirsty believers eagerly awaiting
meager droplets of passed down lore.
Even higher are images of human aspirations—
Understanding, to lift a curtain of ignorance,
Encouragement, pushing Man closer to perfection.

This is the inside of a brain:
an enormous domed space,
grand art inside the skull,
study desks ringing
the central station,
axon-like conveyor belts speeding
expertise to anxious disciples.

Classic pneumatic tubes
carry nerve impulse notes
demanding diverse media
following searches of endless
brain cell card catalogs and appeals
to new computer circuitry.

Genuflect, and respect
the sum of stored knowledge,
despite how much more will accrete
we will always feel incomplete:
the notion of infinity
includes infinity plus three.

If you haven’t yet seen the exhibition that David McCullough calls the one “every American ought to see,” you might want to make a trip to the Library within the next few days.

The original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand, with edits by John Adams and Ben Franklin, will be cycling out of the “Creating the United States” exhibit Oct. 29. It will be replaced by George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, a document that influenced Jefferson and the Founding Fathers.

It will likely be your last chance to see the “real deal” for the next several years.  (”Creating the United States” and the rest of the Library of Congress Experience will be available for visitors at least until 2011.)

Even if you can’t make it to DC, there’s a terrific online version of “Creating the United States” that includes an interactive that lets you virtually explore the draft along with several of its antecedent documents.

The Washington Post wrote about the exhibit today here.

All eyes in the United States over the next couple of weeks will be on the current presidential campaign.

Here at the Library of Congress, we’re taking a bit of a look back — and a musical one, at that.

A few days ago, we opened an exhibition called “Voices, Votes, Victory: Presidential Campaign Songs,” which runs through March 7, 2009:

The exhibit presents a sampling of campaign songs found in the rich collection of sheet music housed in the Music Division of the Library of Congress. The earliest items are rare melodies that honored America’s first presidents for winning and maintaining the young nation’s liberty. Some of the most potent political rhetoric of the 19th century is found in “songsters,” pocket-sized books of lyrics that allowed passionate voters to be ever-ready for an impromptu “sing” to stump for their party’s candidates. Yet other examples show that friends and families joined to campaign around parlor pianos, a trend that continued well into the 20th century.

Even the covers of early campaign-song sheet music were an attempt at spin, featuring elegantly engraved portraits of candidates, sometimes in uniform.

I wonder what a 2008 “songster” might look like?

You can check out the exhibit in the Music Division, which is on the first floor of the Library’s James Madison Building at 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.

I know it is late notice, but if you have some time on your hands this afternoon (and you’re in DC), you might want to stop by an open house from 1 to 4 p.m. in the Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections Division (the Lessing J. Rosenwald Room, across from room 239 in the Thomas Jefferson Building).

The Division will be featuring several new acquisitions, a few of which I’ll describe after the jump.  Light refreshments will be served.

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