About a year ago, the Library worked in conjunction with HISTORY (AKA History Channel) to produce a series of two dozen video vignettes called “This Week’s Hidden Treasure.” Each highlights in roughly two or three minutes a fascinating item from our collections, with its story told by a Library of Congress curator. The videos were …
Audrey Fischer of the Library’s Public Affairs Office offers this guest blog item for Saturday: April 24 marks the Library’s 210th anniversary. Let it be said that the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution keeps getting better with age. In 2000, the Library of Congress celebrated its bicentennial. That same year it embarked on a mission …
Quite often I have to “sit on” very exciting news here until all the details are put into place, and whatever we’re going to announce is ready for prime-time. Such is the case with the new version of our Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC, pronounced “P-pock”), which has launched within the past few days. …
A bunch of ninth-grade girls got in touch with their favorite radio station, making a song request for a tune by one of their favorite artists. But they couldn’t resist the chance to raise that universal complaint: “Why, why, why, why do you always repeat the same songs?” It could have been from the suburbs …
(Guest post by Michelle Springer, Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives) Jan. 16 is the two-year anniversary of the launch of the Library’s account on Flickr, the photosharing website. We started with approximately 3,100 photos in our account; today 30 additional archives, libraries, and museums from the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, the …
There’s something very satisfying in music about the number three: three notes in a basic chord, a romantic waltz in 3/4 time, the three-movement form of early symphonies. So it’s appropriate that the Library’s third blog (behind this one and “Inside Adams” from the Science, Technology and Business Division) would come from the Music Division. …
The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division has added 116 photocrom travel views of the Netherlands from 100 years ago to our Flickr page, bringing the total number of photochroms on Flickr to 773. Photochroms, published primarily from the 1890s to 1910s, are prints that were created by the Photoglob Company in Zürich, Switzerland, and the …
Now that we have a couple of years or more of using social media to benefit the Library’s missions, we’re letting other folks around the institution get in the act. The “Books and Beyond” series in the Center for the Book launched a Facebook page, which is essentially an online book club, with the recent …
(Ed. note: This post comes to us from Phil Michel, Digital Conversion Coordinator for the Prints & Photographs Division, and one of the authors of the new book Baseball Americana.) While the baseball season winds down and the excitement of another World Series chase begins, we’re celebrating the national pastime with a new book, Baseball …
Whether you can be in Washington tomorrow or not, there are many ways for everyone to be a part of the 2009 National Book Festival. I came up with at least a dozen: 1. Attend! It’s tomorrow (Sept. 26) from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EDT on the National Mall (between 7th and 14th), rain …