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“Light and liberty go together.”

When revolutionary-turned-president Thomas Jefferson still walked the streets of Washington, D.C., there were people who wanted to give him a good jab with their index finger and hand him a piece of their minds.

These days, here on Capitol Hill, you can give Thomas Jefferson a jab … and dig a little deeper into his mind.

It’s possible because of a set of exhibitions featuring touch-screen interactive stations, all in the Library’s graceful and ornate Thomas Jefferson Building.  These exhibits collectively are known as “The Library of Congress Experience.”  This offering, available to you for a little over a year now, is winning awards all over the place, and if you visit the Library at First St. S.E. and Independence Avenue and check it out, you’ll find out why.

The Library of Congress Experience places touch-screen stations throughout three exhibitions: Creating the United States, which delves into the collaborative process that led to the major founding documents of our nation; Thomas Jefferson’s Library, featuring more than 6,000 books once in our third president’s personal library that he made available to replace the congressional library torched by the British in the War of 1812; and Exploring the Early Americas, which showcases the amazing pre-Columbian art collection of Library patron Jay Kislak.

There are also touch-screen stations showing off the art and architecture of the breathtaking Thomas Jefferson Building interior and explaining the rarity and relative importance of the Library’s Gutenberg Bible and its Giant Bible of Mainz.

Even better, if you pick up a “Passport to Knowledge” at the orientation desks as you enter the building, you can take just a moment to link your passport to a personalized online account and use the barcode on the passport to “collect” your favorite items in these exhibitions — sending a digitized version of the item to your personal web page.

Won’t be in town to pick up that passport? You can create a personalized web page from home.

About those awards: the latest comes from the GovMark Council, which awarded “Best Overall Marketing Program” to the Experience.  There have been about a dozen previous awards, including Best in Show from the HOW Interactive Design Awards, Best in Show and Deployer of the Year from KioskCom, and a Silver Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America for Excellence in Integrated Communication.

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Strictly Business

With all the various reading rooms available at the Library, did you know there is one with a reference alcove dedicated to business?
The 5th floor of the John Adams Building on Capitol Hill, home to the Science & Business Reading Room, has a staff of business reference specialists to assist with your business-related questions and …

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Cataloging for Gold

For the past 10 weeks, 47 college students have been digging through a variety of Library of Congress collections–finding amazing stuff so people like you can come here and get lost in it.
Such as?
Such as an ad for a patent medicine that figured in an 1898 murder case; a first edition in Russian of …

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This year’s Library of Congress National Book Festival already promises the biggest lineup of literary stars this side of the Crab Nebula. Book-lovers can look forward, on Saturday, Sept. 26, to hearing from David Baldacci, John Grisham, John Irving, Julia Alvarez, Judy Blume, Ken Burns, Gwen Ifill and Jodi Picoult–not to mention celebrity chef …

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What is dance?
Is it storytelling, using human forms to advance the storyline?
Is it movement with music?
Is it movement alone?
Merce Cunningham, a giant of modern dance, asked these questions and answered them–affirmatively in each case–over seven decades.  He died, at age 90, on Sunday in Manhattan.  From his introduction to the avant-garde composer John Cage in 1938 …

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Take a moment out of this busy day to relax at the side of a waterfall at Fairy Glen in Bettws-y-Coed Wales or go explore the castle ruins at Aberystwith, Wales. We’ve loaded 167 new color Photocrom travel views of Wales from 1890-1900 on our Flickr photostream at www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/. The set is full of castles …

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Interactivity with one’s television or computer is normal, today. But there was a time–in a day when talking back to the tube would mark you as a bit odd–when families in the United States gathered to interact with their television receivers in a big way:
They sang along with Mitch.
Between 1961 and 1965, many Americans …

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Herblog

From time to time, we ask ourselves:
Where is the outrage?
Well, for an amazing 72 years, it was on editorial pages, especially that of the Washington Post–in political commentary by the influential cartoonist Herblock (Herb Block), who made presidents and other public figures, from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush, ink-stained and wretched.
The Library of Congress is …

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To paraphrase the old Elvis Presley album, 200 million Facebook fans can’t be wrong.  If you’re reading this, chances are that you might be among them.  So now you can show your de facto national library a little love the easy way—by becoming a fan of our new official Facebook page!
We’ve started with a pretty …

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The authors’ lineup for the National Book Festival on Saturday, Sept. 26 went public today–what star-power!
Bestselling authors David Baldacci, John Grisham, John Irving, Julia Alvarez, Judy Blume, Ken Burns, Gwen Ifill, and Jodi Picoult–as well as celebrity chef Paula Deen–will be among scores of authors and illustrators presenting at the festival, organized and sponsored by …

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