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

The eighth annual National Book Festival (Sept. 27, 2008) has an outstanding lineup of authors, and I’ve been having the privilege of interviewing several of them for podcasts.

The subscription link is here.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I have to disclose that I have been doing my own audio engineering (with practically zero training) on new equipment.  The good news is that the new equipment should significantly increase our capacity to do podcasts.  The bad news is that the first few I recorded weren’t quite so, um, “polished” as more recent ones.  There is a bit of “clipping” in parts, and I sometimes sound like I’m speaking into a coffee can.

Please bear with it, though.  I’ve found every one of the authors with whom I’ve spoken fascinating, and there are some great ones yet to come.

This week, we announced that the Librarian of Congress will award the fourth John W. Kluge Prize for the study of humanity on Dec. 10. But we also announced that nominations will be accepted for a few more weeks, until July 15.

The $1 million Kluge Prize recognizes lifetime achievement in fields not traditionally represented by the Nobel Prize, such as “history, philosophy, politics, anthropology, sociology, religion, criticism in the arts and humanities, and linguistics.”

There is no doubt that Nobel laureates in “hard-science” fields like medicine, physics and chemistry have made incalculable contributions to society. But there are also great thinkers, those who help us frame and answer important questions about ourselves as people, the people whose ideas and writings are no less significant to human progress. Those are the people for whom the Kluge Prize was created.

If you know someone who might fit the bill, you can learn about the nominations process here.

One of my favorite new RSS feeds or email subscriptions from the Library is put out by the folks who bring us “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.” (RSS here, email sign-up here.)

The feed gives a daily look at what was going on in the news 100 years ago — something I tried a couple of times on my own (here and here).

Apropos of the current election season, I recently received this link to a page from June 19, 1908, in the Washington Herald, which proclaims the nomination of William Howard Taft for president.

There is plenty to note on the front page alone, such as Theodore Roosevelt’s peculiar use of the word “peculiar” in his congratulatory statement. There is also this little un-PC observation from a raucous GOP convention in Chicago: “That great audience, numbering to-day nearly 20,000 persons, was in a grand swelter. The lean people liked it–rather enjoyed it–and the fat folks swore under their breath.”

Maybe our modern-day conventions are cheerier affairs because of something as simple as air conditioning?

“Chronicling America” is a terrific resource, and it’s wonderful to have gems like that coming daily (oops, I meant “weekly”) via email.

A wonderfully innovative fan of the Library’s pilot project with Flickr photos decided to restage a World War II-era photo for the modern day, at the same exact location as the original. (The first thing you’ll notice, as the author points out, is that there are many more trees today.)

It immediately reminded me of another photo from the collection (”Factory buildings in Lowell, Mass.?”), on which a commenter posted a link to a photo taken recently from the same vantage point.

There are many interesting things about the Library’s Flickr pilot project, but I get a special kick out of these “then and now” photos. (Then again, stories about time travel were always among my favorites as a child.)

It’s fascinating to see how well a modern photographer can match the exact framing and composition of an original, and then compare the two images side-by-side — almost like looking back through a portal in time.

Wouldn’t it be great to see more of these??

I was saddened today to learn of the death of Tony Schwartz.

You might not immediately know the name, but many Americans — especially those who participate in or follow political campaigns — are undoubtedly aware of at least one piece of his work.

Schwartz was the creator of a famous and controversial 1964 TV ad for Lyndon Johnson, which showed a girl picking petals from a daisy and then a giant nuclear mushroom cloud.  While the ad did not mention the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, by name, the narrator said that “the stakes (were) too high” to stay home on election day.  Regardless, the implication was clear.

The ad itself and the techniques used still reverberate in American politics to this day.

But Schwartz’s legacy will prove to be much greater than a single ad.  For more than five decades, he was an avid collector of audiovisual material, including a vast collection of urban folklore and soundscapes from New York City, which found a permanent home last year in the Library of Congress.

As Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said at the time:

The collection is a treasure trove of unpublished audio-visual material to be explored and discovered by researchers, scholars and patrons. By acquiring and preserving this collection for the American people, the Library of Congress will serve generations of historians, archivists, documentary producers and the general public seeking to experience the voices, sounds and images of post-war America.

My condolences to Schwartz’s family and loved ones.  I hope at least there is solace in this important and permanent legacy that is now available to everyone.

(By the way, my apologies on the lengthy blogging absence.)

The DVD for “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” isn’t released until Tuesday, May 20, but we here at one of the chief locations in the film managed to get our hands on a copy.

The two-disc collectors’ edition and the Blu-Ray edition include a bonus feature titled “Inside the Library of Congress,” and I have to say that we’re very pleased with the outcome. We were told to expect a piece in the five-minute range; we got one that was nearly nine minutes long.

According to one review of the DVD extras (who knew there were such things?):

The Inside the Library of Congress featurette (8:41, 1.78:1 and 2.40:1, 1080p) is first a love letter to an impressive landmark. We’re given a guided tour of the library’s formidable collections. There are laboratories for preservation and authentication. The body of knowledge is nothing short of remarkable.

The featurette takes viewers on a tour of the Thomas Jefferson Building with sweeping shots that are seldom-seen. The crew shooting the piece last year set up a 28-foot-long “jib arm” to get some stunning views of the Great Hall and the Main Reading Room. (The tourists that day were especially curious about what was going on!)

There are also visits to curatorial and other divisions within the Library, with a focus on the plot of NT2 (such as our Lincoln materials), including Geography and Map, Prints and Photographs, Manuscript, Preservation, and the stacks.

As I often say, we hope it offers millions around the world the opportunity to learn about the “fact behind the fiction.”

Did you know that there is a “White House Commission on Remembrance“?

The Commission, established by Public Law 106-579, has a 10-year mission to “sustain the American spirit through acts of remembrance on Memorial Day and throughout the year … institutionalize the National Moment of Remembrance … enhance the commemoration and understanding of Memorial Day and … educate and give the younger generation a sense of our history and what it means to be an American.”

Statutorily, the Librarian of Congress is a member of the Commission, and his designee is the director of the Veterans History Project.

As alluded above, part of the Commission’s charge is to help unite the country in a Moment of Remembrance every Memorial Day at 3 p.m. local time.

So if you were wondering what’s in the left-hand sidebar (as of this writing), both VHP and this blog have included the Moment of Remembrance countdown clock on our respective sites leading up to Memorial Day.

You can get the code to add the countdown to your own site here.

Comic Book Guy of “The Simpsons” has been known to have a cardiac episode or two. But an acquisition the Library of Congress just made might give his heart its “worst episode ever.” (Apologies for borrowing the pun from that particular “episode.”)

“Spider-senses” all around the Library were set tingling when we learned that the Library had just acquired 24 pages of original 1962 drawings from “Amazing Fantasy #15,” which marked the first time the world’s most famous web-slinger, Spider-Man, would appear in print anywhere. The Spider-Man origin story in “Amazing Fantasy” was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko; the pages are Ditko originals, complete with pencil erasures and white-out opaquing fluid.

The acquisition came to the Library within the past few weeks, thanks to an anonymous donor. (News had already begun leaking out — where else — in the blogosphere.)

A couple of colleagues and I got the opportunity yesterday afternoon the see the pages in person. (Don’t worry, we made sure to keep our drool far away from the art.) They do indeed appear to be in very good condition, especially considering their age. The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division (P&P) provided me with a scan of one of the pages and a detail section, which you’ll see here at right. (They are, in actuality, even a bit less yellow than the scans appear.)

I also snapped a few pictures as Helena Zinkham, acting chief of P&P, carefully splayed some of them out for us on a table. In one of the shots of the very first page, you get a clear sense of some of the areas where white-out was applied. The “SPIDER-MAN” title balloon in the banner is literally stuck onto the page.

People who are more familiar with Amazing Fantasy #15 than I are probably not surprised by this fact, but I got a good chuckle from the disclaimer that appeared at the top of the first page (pictured at left). It almost seems to be begging skeptical readers to give Spider-Man a chance, completely unaware of the phenomenon that was about to be unleashed on the world.

The excessively exclamatory paragraph reads: “Like costume heroes? Confidentially, we in the comic mag business refer to them as ‘long underwear characters’! And, as you know, they’re a dime a dozen! But, we think you may find our SPIDERMAN just a bit … different!”

Most sentient beings are already aware that Marvel’s Spider-Man is one of the most popular superheroes ever, spawning several comic-book series, graphic novels, television series, video games, toys, a blockbuster movie franchise, and adding phrases to our popular lexicon such as “true believers” and “your friendly neighborhood (fill-in-the-blank).”

The pages will be digitized within the next few weeks, although access to the images will likely be restricted to on-site use at the Library (copyright restrictions and such). The pages themselves are available to researchers with a valid reader-identification card by appointment only.

Our full news release can be found here.

I never try to guess where an editor will place a story, but I hear a rumor that J. Jonah Jameson will be giving this front-page treatment.

Tags: spider-man, spiderman, comics, comic books, superheroes, marvel, marvel comics, marvel entertainment, marvel enterprises, stan lee, steve ditko

My, how time flies.

If I weren’t back on Atkins, I might be tempted to track down a cupcake and a birthday candle, because today is the first anniversary of this blog. (It is also, not coincidentally, the 208th birthday of the Library of Congress, a milestone this blog itself will not reach until the year 2215, long after the entire Internet has been downloaded onto nanobots and injected into our bloodstreams. Assuming, of course, that our new nanobot overlords still indeed call it the “Internet.”)

I don’t really have anything particularly profound to say about it, but when has that ever stopped a blogger?

Here is a short list of observations, lessons learned, and potential new directions:

1 ) The past year has been an incredibly fun voyage. I have treasured the interaction, the ability to communicate in ways that more traditional mechanisms don’t really permit, telling a few interesting stories you might not otherwise read about, and the thought that I have been able even in a small measure to stoke people’s interest in the Library of Congress.

2 ) You comment-spammers are persistent!

3 ) When we launched, there were fewer than 10 federal blogs, and we were — as far as I know — the first truly institution-wide blog among federal agencies. As of today, that list has more than tripled to at least 31. Even if it all ends tomorrow, it’s a distinction of which I’ll always be proud.

I’m also humbled that we have been able to provide many of our sister agencies (at least a dozen, I’m sure, but I’ve lost count) with guidance and advice as they wade into their own blogospheric waters. (Michelle Springer in our OSI Web Services Division deserves much of the credit here.) If being among the first has helped others to follow, I think that in itself is a pretty nice legacy to have.

4 ) I danced a little happy dance when we cracked the Technorati Top 10,000. We have basically a single post to thank for that. We were wallowing well into the 40,000s before that.

5 ) I have a meeting scheduled tomorrow with some folks internally to help plot a course for future improvements. Maybe I’ll bring low-carb cheesecake.

First and foremost will involve upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, but we want to look beyond the merely technical. (And yes, I’d like to fix a lot of those glitchy punctuation issues that seem to pop up on old posts. I’m told it’s a javascript something-or-other, but I don’t know what coffee has to do with anything.)

6 ) It’s taken longer than expected, but I still anticipate that this blog will leave “pilot” status and achieve formal recognition. This is probably more federalese than you’re interested in, but getting a policy in place also holds the door open to additional blogs sprouting up around the Library. Some of my colleagues are coming to me with great ideas, and I have to confess that I can’t wait to become an avid reader of other Library blogs. Frankly, my own writing bores me to tears — but thanks for sticking with me anyway.

7 ) Every day that I do not have time to post, I am wracked with horrible guilt. My various other duties come first, duties which are very much not in pilot status, but I know that regularity and compelling content build readership and a sense of community. I am very interested in building on what we started a year ago. Perhaps it’s time to make another run at wheedling some of my colleagues into co-author status. (I have to admit to being a wee bit jealous of other federal blogs with multiple contributors, although I am fortunate to have wonderful ideas and draft language that are often sent to me by colleagues.)

8 ) And finally, if the nanobots are reading this, I hope that they keep this blog — or whatever its successor ends up being — up and running. Access to knowledge is at the core of our mission, something I am confident will remain true long after I and everyone I work with today are long gone.

Meanwhile, we continue to take additional steps into Web 2.0. I anticipate that you’ll soon start to see a lot more video content from the Library in a lot more places, and much better stuff than my own interim slap-dash efforts. (What’s the deal with my “Brary of Ongress” avatar?!)

We’re talking about expanding on social-networking in meaningful ways. For instance, we’d really like to find a way to allow people to share their myLOC collections beyond just the typical “send a postcard” links, which are admittedly a little last century. Also, I’ve been dabbling in Twitter a bit in my spare time. I’m still intimidated by the thought of having “another beast to feed,” but I have to admit that I do like the concept.

We have a lot of whip-smart people around here with a lot of ambitious ideas. Resources and time permitting, I hope to help them realize as many of those goals as we can.

What do you think would improve this blog? Where would you like to see the Library go next in Web 2.0?

(Image of very old computer from the PPOC.)

Tags: blogs, bloggers, web 2.0, web2.0, library of congress, libraryofcongress, bloggiversary, bloggiversaries

I appreciate all of the email feedback I get, both the positive and, yes, even the negative constructive criticism.

I got an email yesterday, however, that was too good not to share it in its entirety, with the author’s permission. And I swear we didn’t pay him to write this:

I just visited the Library of Congress for the first time yesterday [April 21]. It was pouring rain, and I went in through the Madison building to get my Researcher card and came to the Jefferson building through the tunnel. I took care of my business at the Folklife Center, then wandered around to the front from the rear corridors, so I wasn’t ready for the full impact of the front part of the building.

I have traveled a bit - not as much as I’d like, but a bit - and I’ve seen some beautiful things. I’ve never been stunned by the sheer beauty of a place like that in my life. Aside from my son being born and my wife on our wedding day, I have never been moved like that by sheer, stunning beauty.

If it’s possible to fall in love with a building, I may have.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to actually work there. Could a person spend day after day surrounded by so much grace and beauty and not be changed in some subtle, fundamental way? Would it make you more awake to the beauty around you or would it raise your expectations so much that everything would start to feel washed out and empty?

The exhibitions were startlingly well done, too, by the way. I was struck by how sensitively they’d been put together. The Constitution exhibit didn’t shy away from how some people had been failed by our Constitution. (I loved the Native American woman in the AV display describing her contempt for it.) I love that to get to the 16th Century maps, you walked through a really well put together exhibit of Mezoamerican culture. (I particularly liked the description of the extent of the Inca Empire). I loved the touchscreen technology on the monitors scattered around throughout the public area of the building.

The one impression that stays with me is that of the staircase leading up from the tunnel. You come out of a very functional, utilitarian tunnel into a staircase that is very 1920s/30s and as you walk up the marble steps, you feel just the slightest bit off-balance because each step has been worn down by a century or so of people walking on them. There is a feeling of continuity in that which really inspires me.

As I proof-read this letter, I am astonished by the number of times I’ve used the word “love”. I’m a grumpy, curmudgeonly person by nature. I don’t throw the word “love” around casually. Obviously the Library has touched me in some important way.

Thank you.

John Fladd
New Boston, NH
www.almostgruntled.com

Tags: thomas jefferson building, library of congress, libraryofcongress, architecture, history, dc, washingtondc, washington dc, tourism, travel