Library of Congress's Blog, page 135

Rare Object of the Month: Unrequited Love for the Ages

(The following is a guest blog post written by Elizabeth Gettins, Library of Congress digital library specialist.) 

This month, the Rare Book of the Month is not actually a book but objects from the special collections within the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we take a peek into the love life of James Madison through the work of a remarkable early American artist by the name of Charles Willson Peale.

Fourth President of the United States James Madison (1751-1836) was called the “Father of the Bill of Rights,” as well as the “Father of the Constitution.” He was also instrumental in reestablishing the Library of Congress following the War of 1812.

James Madison miniature. Charles Willson Peale, 1783. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

While Madison is indeed an impressive historical figure, it appears that in person he may have been less than an appealing catch to the ladies. Madison was known to perpetually suffer from delicate health and was small of stature, even for the standards of his day. Records indicate that he was only five feet, four inches and never weighed more than 100 pounds. He was also known to be socially introverted. However, he had a keen mind and was a very diligent scholar – so diligent in fact that it was thought to further exacerbate his health conditions.

Most men of Madison’s era married by their mid-twenties. Yet Madison did not advance a marriage proposal until the relatively advanced age of 32. Catherine “Kitty” Floyd, the daughter of a Continental Congress delegate, caught his eye. In 1783, as tokens of their mutual love, Madison and Floyd exchanged ivory miniature portraits of themselves by the artist Charles Willson Peale. As a special sign of esteem, Madison included a braided lock of his hair. Unfortunately, this love was not destined to last as Kitty fell in love with another suitor and sent Madison a rejection letter. Understandably, Madison was crushed.

Verso of oval portrait miniature showing Madison’s hair in braided pattern. 1783. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This short courtship is frozen in time by the beautifully delicate and charming portraiture created by Peale. Peale was an American renaissance man who rubbed elbows with many prominent politicians and businessmen of his day. He was born in 1741 in Queen Anne’s County, Maryland. At a young age, Peale showed promise in portraiture and studied under well-established artists of his time, including John Hesselius, John Singleton Copley, John Beale Bordley and Benjamin West.

Catherine “Kitty” Floyd portrait miniature. Charles Willson Peale, 1783. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Peale went on to become a prolific artist, painting the portraits of prominent men of his time including Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. An interesting side note about Peale is that he named all of his children after artists or scientists. Three of his sons went on to paint themselves, including Rembrandt, Raphaelle and Titian Peale. Peale and his son’s works made contributions towards documenting an early American nation and also of helping to create an American sensibility in art.

While Madison’s love life did not travel an easy course, he did go on to have a happy ending. It was not until 11 years later that he advanced another marriage proposal. This time he was successful and, at the age of 43, he married he married Dolley Payne Todd (1768-1849) on Sept. 15, 1794. From all accounts, it was a happy marriage. Seventeen years his junior, Dolley was a widow that Madison likely encountered at social events in the nation’s capital. She was known for her social graces, which likely helped Madison’s popularity as president. The ever consummate hostess and decorator, Dolley went on to give definition to the role that the wife of an American president played. The concept of First Lady took shape around her pleasant and graceful entertaining skills.

Other Sources at the Library of Congress

From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division

Continental Congress Broadside Collection
Constitutional Convention Broadside Collection
The James Madison Pamphlet Collection

 

A Valentine for the Ages: The Biblical “Song of Songs”

(The following post is by Ann Brener, Hebraic area specialist in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division.)

With its rich nature imagery and enigmatic dream-like sequences, the “Song of Songs” (also known as the “Songs of Solomon”) is surely one of the world’s great love poems and one of the most popular books in the Old and New Testaments. A few lines are enough to entice any reader into its magic:

The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines in blossom give forth their fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the cliffs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for thy voice is sweet and thy countenance comely.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vineyards; for our vineyards are in blossom.

My beloved is mine, and I am his, that feedeth among the lilies.

Until the day ebbs and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a gazelle or a young hart upon the mountains of spices. (“Song of Songs” 2: 1-5)

“Song of Songs” from the First Rabbinic Bible. Venice, 1517. African and Middle Eastern Division.

Though scholars often demur, the “Song of Songs” is traditionally attributed to King Solomon himself, ruler of the Kingdom of Israel around 960 B.C. Yet even this exalted attribution was not enough to guarantee the “Song of Songs” a place in the canon of sacred writ.

Ancient Jewish lore tells us that in the dark days following the disastrous uprising against Rome and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the Jewish sages met to canonize the various books of Holy Writ into a single Hebrew Bible, fearful lest the sacred writings be lost. In the ensuing debate over what to keep in the Bible and what to keep out, it was the great Rabbi Akiba who answered critics of the poem’s undeniably sensual nature, saying that “if other books of the Bible were sacred, then the ‘Song of Songs’ is the most sacred of all.” Thus the exquisite poem became one of the 24 books included in the Hebrew Bible, and, along with Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, one of the three biblical books traditionally ascribed to King Solomon.

“Song of Songs” in micrography. Germany, 1920. African and Middle Eastern Division.

With the dawn of printing in the 15th century, the “Song of Songs” was amongst the first texts to roll off the press, and through the years it has served as a focus for artists and printers alike – all of which has resulted in the “goodly treasures new and old” now lining the shelves of the Library of Congress, to quote from the “Song of Songs” itself (7: 13). One of the most precious early editions is the one included in a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice, 1517, by the fabled Daniel Bomberg, printer of so many first editions of Hebrew classics. Known as the First Rabbinic Bible, this was the first printed Bible to incorporate the “masorah” – the body of ancient Judaic tradition relating to the correct textual reading of the Hebrew Bible.

“Song of Songs” illustrated by Ze’ev Raban. Berlin, 1923.
African and Middle Eastern Division.

A most unique edition of the “Song of Songs” is a lovely example of Hebrew micrography created in 1920 Germany, by Abraham Stollerman. Micrography is the scribal practice of employing minuscule script to create abstract shapes or figurative designs and is an art form found in some of the most beautiful Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages. The heart-shaped image, less than five inches tall, contains the “Song of Songs” in its entirety – all eight chapters.

This “Song of Songs” was printed in Berlin in 1923, but its illustrations were created by , Ze’ev Raban (1890-1970), an artist based in Jerusalem. Raban is perhaps the foremost representative of the Bezalel School of Art, founded in Jerusalem in 1906 and famous for its distinctive blend of Art Nouveau with motifs from the ancient Near East.

“Song of Songs” illustrated by Mordechai Beck. Jerusalem, ca. 1999. African and Middle Eastern Division.

This magnificent limited-edition “Song of Songs” features the etchings of Mordechai Beck, whose sinuous shapes in black and white emphasize the sensual dimension of the text. Featuring the calligraphy of Yitshak Pludwinski, it was published in Jerusalem around 1999.

These four editions of the “Song of Songs,” each so different in style, offer a unique glimpse into Jewish culture and history across the ages. They are, however, only a sampling from the collections of the Hebraic Section, and it is our hope that readers will take the opportunity to come view these and other editions for themselves.

Library in the News: January 2016 Edition

January was a month filled with awards and honors.

The Library welcomed Gene Luen Yang as the fifth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

Michael Cavna of The Washington Post covered the inauguration ceremony and wrote, “Yang — a charismatic, high-energy speaker — was able to present himself dually as both authentically dimensional scholar and simplified cartoon character. This touch was brilliant, because not only did Yang offer a humbly nerdy avatar that the grade-schoolers could instantly warm up to, and perhaps some even identify with; he also was displaying the very strength that most distinguishes him as an ambassador: the ability to connect through the magical marriage of words and pictures.”

“In reflecting on his new role as ambassador, Mr. Yang said he found his wife, Theresa, a development director for an elementary school, a tremendous resource. He said that he was inspired by her program for encouraging students to read and write in different genres and that she was enthusiastic about the ambassadorship,” said George Gene Gustines for the New York Times.

“Does anyone say no to this? It’s an amazing opportunity,” Yang told Sue Corbett of .

Yang was on the Kojo Nnamdai Show to discuss his role, Asian-American identity and comic book culture.

Kelly McEvers of spoke with Yang about becoming the first graphic novelist to be named ambassador.

Yang was also featured in stories on CCTV and Washington Post .

The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize concert honoring Willie Nelson aired nationwide on PBS in January. Many outlets not only reported on the broadcast but also on Nelson’s Gershwin-inspired album that drops in February.

Speaking of prizes, winners of the 2015 Holland Prize for architectural drawing were announced in January. The Smithsonian Magazine and Fine Books & Collections Magazine highlighted the winners, who were actually only honorable mentions.

Trending: African American History Month

(The following article by Audrey Fischer is from the January/February 2016 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM. You can read the issue in its entirety here.)

Carter G. Woodson, 1947. Prints and Photographs Division.

One man’s dedication to a field of study inspired the moniker “the father of African American history.”

With this year’s theme of “Hallowed Grounds: Sites of African American Memories,” will be celebrated in schools, libraries and other cultural institutions throughout the month of February.

One such sacred ground is 1538 Ninth Street N.W. in Washington, D.C., home to Carter G. Woodson, pictured above, (1875-1950), the Harvard-educated historian who established Black History Week in 1926. The property was declared a National Historic Site in 1976—the same year that the recognition of African Americans’ contributions to the nation was extended to a month-long celebration.

 

In his “Message on the Observance of Black History Month” in February 1976, President Gerald Ford acknowledged Woodson’s founding of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASAALH) as a way to document those contributions. The organization was founded in 1915 at the house on Ninth Street, where Carter lived until his death in 1950. With more than 25 branches, the membership organization holds an annual convention in cities across the nation.

Woodson believed that, “Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.” He devoted his life to researching, publishing and increasing public awareness of black history and culture.

Woodson researched his dissertation at the Library of Congress, where he was encouraged by Manuscript Division Chief J. Franklin Jameson to seek funding to further his goals. With a grant from the Carnegie Foundation, Woodson founded the ASAALH. In 1929 and 1938, Woodson donated his papers to the Library of Congress. The bulk of the collection’s 18,000 items have been microfilmed and the film is available in the Library’s Manuscript Reading Room.

The collection includes primary documents relating to African-American life and history during the slavery, Reconstruction and “New South” eras. It also includes material related to Woodson’s editing of the “Encyclopedia Africana,” a comprehensive guide to African peoples, leaders, and luminaries in Africa, the United States, South America, the Caribbean, and worldwide. The unpublished research for that ambitious publication, along with other unique items, makes the collection a valuable resource for scholars and students of African American history.

New Blog Series: New Online

(The following is a guest post by William Kellum, manager in the Library’s Web Services Division.)

This is the first post in a new monthly series highlighting new collections, items and presentations on the Library’s website. After checking out the items mentioned here, be sure to visit some of our other blogs that highlight our collections in more depth, such as Picture This, Now See Hear and Worlds Revealed.

New Collections and Items:

The Library’s American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) – a collaboration with the WGBH Educational Foundation – announced this week the acquisition of the New Hampshire Public Radio’s digital collection of interviews and speeches by presidential candidates from 1995-2007. The entire collection – nearly 100 hours of content – is now online, along with other presidential campaign content from the AAPB collection, in a new curated, free presentation, “Voices of Democracy: Public Media and Presidential Elections.”

The Library’s Manuscripts Division has been hard at work digitizing collections of historic American documents, with dozens of primary source collections online (you can see the full list here).

The Salmon P. Chase Papers consist of 12,500 items from the papers of this former Ohio governor, Lincoln cabinet official and Supreme Court justice. The papers focus chiefly on Chase’s legal career, activities as an abolitionist, involvement in Ohio and national politics, tenure as secretary of the treasury (1861-1864), influence on national finance and service as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court (1864-1873).

The William Tecumseh Sherman Papers include approximately 18,000 items of correspondence, a volume of recollections during and after the Mexican War, military documents, printed matter, memorabilia and manuscripts of Sherman’s “Memoirs.” The manuscript of the “Memoirs” and a long narrative of wartime experiences supplement the correspondence for the Civil War period. The correspondence in the collection is particularly strong for the years when Sherman served as commanding general of the army (1869-1883).

Sherman’s papers also include thousands of pages of letters and personal recollections, along with historical documents like this certificate (left) of thanks signed by President Abraham Lincoln, awarded to Sherman after his capture of Atlanta in 1864. Like many of our digitized items, users can freely download a high resolution image of this document.

The Library’s extensive digitization efforts include a stream of individual items, in addition to the types of full collections mentioned above. We frequently add new digitized items to loc.gov via “one off” scanning – for example, this 1876 map (below) – “Colton’s new topographical map of the states of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland & Delaware” 

You can use the deep zoom feature on the item’s resource view to see roads, rivers, railroads, and more. Check out more digitized maps.

Five new digitized items are added to the Poetry and Literature Center’s Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape and Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature each month, along with biographies of the poets and authors. Check out this recording of Robert Creeley reading his poems (with commentary), recorded in the Library’s Recording Laboratory in 1961.

Upgrades and Updates:

American Memory was, for many years, the Library’s flagship online presence, a ground-breaking collection of digitized primary sources and scholarly materials. It is gradually being migrated to new presentations that allow for a modern web experience, as well as updated searching and browsing. Recent migrations include the American Folklife Center’s Captain Pearl R. Nye: Life on the Ohio and Erie Canal Collection, featuring 75 recordings from 1937-38 (by John, Ruby, and Alan Lomax) of songs documenting life on the canal. From the Law Library and the Rare Books Divisions comes The Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 Collection, featuring materials drawn from 105 manuscripts and books associated with the Dred Scott case and the abolitionist activities of John Brown, John Quincy Adams, and William Lloyd Garrison.

Also in a new presentation is An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca. 1490 to 1920, bringing you social dance guides dating back to 1490. Library experts have helpfully grouped the materials topically, in case you want to find for example, Anti-dance materials.

The Library holds hundreds of lectures, concerts, poetry readings, author talks and more each year, most of which are filmed and made available online via our video portal. We’ve recently been re-digitizing thousands of videos that have previously only been available in low resolution legacy formats, including updating more than 1,700 webcasts to new, high quality MP4 video.

{mediaObjectId:'2925E1E8728000E6E0538C93F11600E6',playerSize:'mediumStandard'}

In this video, Library Music Specialist Larry Applebaum conducts a fascinating interview with the late music legend Allen Toussaint on the New Orleans piano tradition, Professor Longhair, the challenges of songwriting and producing, and the impact of Hurricane Katrina.

The Veterans History Project has recently upgraded thousands of video interviews from legacy formats to a high quality presentation accessible on any device. Search and browse the collection at loc.gov/vets, or see highlighted presentations like Experiencing War.

February is African American History Month – we’ve recently updated our with links to featured content from collaborators at the Smithsonian, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Park Service and the National Archives.

Next month we’ll be back with a new collection of digitized items from the Rosa Parks Papers, new archived Web Site content, improvements to our user interface, and more.

Pic of the Week: A Party of Pulitzers

Docent Ira Adler (front left) escorts a group of Pulitzer Prize winners in the Great Hall last week. The recipients
were in Washington for the kickoff event of a yearlong celebration marking the prize’s centennial. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Thirteen Pulitzer Prize winners visited the Library last week while in Washington for festivities celebrating the esteemed award. Steve Benson, who won the prize for editorial cartooning in 1993; former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove (poetry, 1987); Jennifer Egan (fiction, 2011); Paul Giblin (local reporting, 2009); Joan Hedrick (biography, 1995); David Levering Lewis (biography, 1994 and 2001); Jeffrey Marx (investigative reporting, 1986); Philip Schultz (poetry, 2008); Jane Smiley (fiction, 1992); Tracy K. Smith (poetry, 2012); T.J. Stiles (biography, 2010); Jonathan Weiner (nonfiction, 1995); and Michael York (investigative reporting, 1986). The group toured the Jefferson Building and sat for videotaped interviews.

Other Washington events — all part of a yearlong celebration for the prize’s centennial — included a special reception at the Newseum, where more than 300 prize winners were in attendance.

The Pulitzer Prizes were established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer in 1917 to honor high achievement in journalism, literature and musical composition in the United States.

Voices of White House Hopefuls

(The following is a story written by Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library of Congress staff newsletter, The Gazette.)

New Hampshire long has been a place where presidential hopes are born, revived and, sometimes, die.

New Hampshire is where Edmund Muskie famously cried, Ronald Reagan let everyone know who paid for that microphone, Bill Clinton declared himself the “Comeback Kid” and John McCain rode his “Straight Talk Express” into electoral contention.

As voters there prepare for the polls again, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) – a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the WGBH Educational Foundation – this week announced the acquisition of a radio-broadcast collection documenting candidates’ efforts to woo voters in the first-in-the-nation primary.

The New Hampshire Public Radio digital collection – almost 100 hours of content – covers campaigns from 1995 to 2007 and features a wide range of White House hopefuls: among others, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Al Gore, Bob Dole, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes and Hillary Clinton, both as first lady and as a presidential candidate.

That material, along with other presidential-campaign content from AAPB, is showcased in a new online exhibition, “Voices of Democracy: Public Media and Presidential Elections.”

“We are fortunate to live at the epicenter of the political universe every four years. It is from this vantage that we are able to capture and keep some of the most memorable and historic moments in the past 35 years of our democracy,” New Hampshire Public Radio President and CEO Betsy Gardella said. “Knowing that this archive can now be tapped and used by anyone with Internet access is an extension of our public service mission realized. We are grateful for the AAPB.”

The AAPB preserves and makes accessible the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years – national and local news, local-history programs, programs exploring religion, education, music, art, literature and dance.

In October, the AAPB launched its Online Reading Room, featuring 2.5 million inventory records and more than 11,500 audiovisual streaming files of content dating to the early 1950s.

“The geographic breadth of the material available on the website will allow researchers to help uncover ways that national and even global processes – gender equality, economic cycles and environmental changes – played out at the local level,” said Alan Gevinson of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, who manages the Library’s role in the project. “The long chronological reach, from the early 1950s to the present, supplies scholars, educators and the general public with previously inaccessible primary source material to document change over time.”

The New Hampshire material features presidential hopefuls announcing their candidacies, delivering stump speeches, submitting to interviews, hosting town halls and fielding questions from sometimes-skeptical listeners.

Obama, appearing on The Exchange call-in radio show in 2007, talked about “changing how politics is done in Washington” – prompting a listener to wonder if he was too “Pollyannaish” for office.

“I come out of Chicago politics – not known for being genteel,” Obama replied.

Bill Clinton, seeking re-election to the White House, staged a joint town hall with Newt Gingrich in 1995 – the first such event, Gingrich reckoned, ever to feature a sitting president and speaker of the House.

Before a delighted audience and a lone heckler, Clinton and Gingrich discussed balanced budgets, health-care reform, Medicare, four moose spotted on the road that morning and the pit stop for doughnuts Gingrich made before the event. “This is why you’ve done better with your figure than I’ve done with mine,” the speaker quipped.

“Voices of Democracy,” the online presentation created by Lily Troia of AAPB, features the New Hampshire material as well as interviews, speeches, debates, commentary and analysis spanning a much longer period, from 1961 to 2008.

Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy discusses proposals for the Peace Corps in 1960, human rights marchers protest the day before the 1964 Republican National Convention, Eldridge Cleaver speaks as the Peace and Freedom Party candidate in 1968, Iowa Public Television explores the role of the press in the primary process in “See How They Run.”

Some things change: All-white, all-male panels give way to more diverse groups, the clips of speakers smoking as they work gradually fade out.

But the concerns of voters, AAPB project manager Casey Davis said, largely remain constant, with the same issues coming up again and again.

“The material documents political process over the last 50 years at a time when people are getting ready to select the next leader of the United States,” Davis said. “We can look back at how these issues have been at the forefront of the voters’ consciousness for several decades now and at how far we have to go.”

Access to Knowledge

(The following story by Jennifer Gavin is featured in the January/February 2016 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM. You can read the issue in its entirety here.)

From MARC to metadata, the Library’s catalog records and expert staff provide access to a treasure trove of knowledge.

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A mural by Charles Sprague Pearce in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Prints and Photographs Division

In the beginning—that is, in 1800—the Library of Congress consisted of 740 books and three maps, all tucked into a room in the U. S. Capitol. Finding the right book, or map didn’t take long.

Today there are more than 162 million items in the collections available to researchers. Books and other printed materials numbered more than 38 million; there were 70 million manuscripts, 5.5 million maps, 14 million photos and nearly 2 million films. To discover and access these resources, researchers need a guide.

Often, it’s a research librarian—a modern day knowledge navigator—encountered in-person in one of the Library’s 20 reading rooms, or, for many, through the “Ask a Librarian” service online. Many an author whose work was researched at the Library of Congress will speak gratefully about the direction and extra effort delivered by such librarians to patrons, daily.

But even a trained research librarian has to know how to use a system to locate that particular book, serial title or other object in the great trove that is the Library of Congress.

Enter the Library’s catalogers—the great, unsung heroes and heroines of the knowledge delivery business. They stave off chaos and ensure access to knowledge by establishing order from the start.

“Catalogs”, “finding aids”, and “metadata” are all terms used to refer to the description of resources in the Library’s collection. “Description” itself is a broad term, referring to information about a resource’s physical properties as well as providing controlled name authority data about its creator and assigning subject headings and classification numbers to reflect its content. Catalogers create descriptions using internationally established

standards so that catalogs in the largest to smallest libraries can represent the same resource in the same manner.

Back in the day, the Library created and maintained vast handwritten, or typed cards stored in acreages of card catalogs—tall chests of specialized drawers that held indexing material used by researchers to locate books. Today, cataloging is computerized and the output is shared with other libraries, sometimes in multiple formats.

The move to automating catalog records was led by a seminal figure in library science, Henriette D. Avram, who joined the Library of Congress in 1965 and created the ARC (machine-readable cataloging) format. Avram, who was not formally trained as a librarian, had learned computer programming in an earlier job at the National Security Agency. But upon her arrival at the Library, she steeped herself in Library needs, knowledge and lore so she could determine what data would underpin MARC, a system that won worldwide adoption and earned Avram many awards, including some of the highest honors bestowed within library science.

MARC made it possible for cataloging data to be entered, accessed and stored on mainframe computers and shared cooperatively with partner libraries around the world.

To succeed the MARC format in the age of the semantic web and linked open data technologies, the Library of Congress is leading the effort to create a new bibliographic data carrier called the Bibliographic Framework Initiative. BIBFRAME will be a carrier for library data that will be shareable not only with other libraries that share the same systems, but on the World Wide Web through a semantic technology called linked open data.

BIBFRAME will open the world of bibliographic data to the linked open data world, making library data truly interchangeable in the web environment. The many years of effort the Library of Congress and its partners have put into creating thesauri and establishing authorized headings for creators can be redeployed and ultimately used to help “organize” the web as well as make library resources instantly findable through search engines for the users.

The Library’s catalog is freely available online. It includes references to resources in all formats and may provide links to materials that have been digitized. Interlibrary loan services are available to researchers from other libraries who find that the only copy of a material they need for their work is available at the Library of Congress.

Today, many books, newspapers, magazines, manuscripts, maps, films, photographs and other library materials are freely available on the web. Some 52.3 million digital files are available from the Library of Congress through its website and many are in the public domain.

“Digitization will become more and more extensive over time, and more books and other library materials are ‘born digital,’ said Beacher Wiggins, the Library’s director for acquisitions and bibliographic access. “Yet even when we digitize an item, we also maintain the original for its archival value.”

Whether you choose to access its resources in person or online, the Library of Congress is working to ensure that you will always be able to find the “it” you’re looking for in its vast collections.

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Elihu Vedder’s mosaic of “Minerva” on the second floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building depicts the goddess of wisdom and peace. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Prints and Photographs Division

Pic of the Week: #MyTradition

In celebration of its 40th anniversary, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (AFC) has launched year-long campaign asking Americans to share photos of their folk traditions. The campaign kicks off a year of events that will commemorate AFC’s four decades as the institution of record for American folk traditions and ensure that it remains the country’s most vibrant folklife archive and research center well into the future.

The Balkan singing group Slaveya performing at a National Folk Organization event. The group includes several Library of Congress employees, including AFC’s Theadocia Austen. For them, Balkan singing and costume are “MyTradition.” L-r: Anne Harrison, Katie Kathryn, Tzvety Weiner, Theadocia Austen, Betsy Smith Platt, Karen Chittenden and Helen Fedor. Courtesy of Theadocia Austen.

The photo campaign asks participants to share the photos to Flickr with the tag “MyTradition” and a Creative Commons license. Photos should highlight a folk tradition in which they themselves participate, creating a collective snapshot of folklife in 2016.

“Do you prepare a family recipe that goes back for generations? Do you sing, dance, tell stories, sew, quilt, craft, or make things by hand as part of a family, ethnic, regional, or occupational tradition? If so, we’d love your photos! We’re looking specifically for photos of a folklife tradition in which you participate yourself. The photo doesn’t necessarily have to include you, but that would be nice—and selfies are welcome,” said the AFC.

You can read more about folklife traditions and the #MyTradition initiative in this blog post from Folklife Today. Help the folklife center celebrate its 40th, and start sharing your photos!

He Came From the Near East

(The following is a guest post written by Anchi Hoh, a program specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division.)

If you read last month’s Christmas-related blog post “An Armenian ‘Three Magi’ at the Library of Congress” by Levon Avdoyan, you may be wondering how the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division acquired some of its collections. Avdoyan wrote that the Three Magi calligraphy sheet and other items were procured in the 1930s from Kirkor Minassian (1874-1944), a renowned dealer in fine Islamic and Near Eastern art, with establishments both in New York and Paris and who was an authority on Near Eastern manuscripts. One cannot answer the question of how the Library acquired some of its Near Eastern treasures without mentioning Minassian’s story and his importance to the nation’s library.

The prelude of this story was set in 1921 when the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were transferred from the Department of State to the Library. The Library built a shrine to hold these two documents in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building. These two documents were housed in the Library until 1941, when they were moved for safekeeping to the U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox in Kentucky.

Sometime in the beginning of 1929, Minassian decided to make his first visit to the Library to pay homage to the two documents. This encounter was captured in the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress 1929:

“His first visit to the Library of Congress, where he saw the originals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States in their specially constructed shrine, so impressed Mr. Kirkor Minassian, of New York City, that immediately upon his return to his home he sent us what proved to be the first of a series of gifts, totaling 90 separate items.”

This series of gifts started with mainly Arabic manuscripts, calligraphy sheets and clay tablets in the cuneiform writing of the Sumerian civilization. That very first visit by Minassian and his first group of donations to what he called “our Library of Congress” marked the beginning of his decade-long relationship with the Library.

Cuneiform tablet no. 35. One of the 12 school exercise tablets, with transcription and drawing. Some of the tablets were probably used for teaching boys and girls in the temple schools of Sumeria (today’s southern Iraq). 2200-1900 B.C.

Herbert Putnam (1861-1955), then Librarian of Congress, described Minassian’s gifts as “striking examples and forms of literary, historical and artistic expression, which have been heretofore lacking in our collections and exhibits.” Putnam further said that the contribution of Minassian’s own initiative to the enrichment of the national Library was recognition of its aims and service.

The materials the Library acquired from Minassian were brought together over a period of 40 years during his numerous visits to the Near East, Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan, India and even to the borders of Tibet. In addition to his work dealing Near Eastern and Indian antiquities, Minassian maintained a personal collection of Islamic manuscripts, textiles, sculptural objects and ceramics. He was very generous in lending his personal collection for exhibition and publication purposes. The Art Institute of Chicago, the Morgan Memorial Museum in Connecticut and the Brooklyn Museum were among the institutions that exhibited his collection items.

This single sheet of a Fal-i Qur’an (divination by the Quran) lays out in rhyming Persian distichs (couplets) the means of divination by letters selected at random when opening to a page of the Qur’an. 1550-1600.

Between 1930 and 1937, Minassian made a series of supplementary gifts of a related nature to the Library. Among these was a collection of manuscript treasures. This collection consists primarily of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, mostly single pages dating from the eighth to the 18th centuries, with material illustrative of Arabic and Persian calligraphy of different periods, as well as characteristic examples of Near Eastern book decoration and illumination.

The Library at the time did not have the means of acquiring any serious number of materials such as these and the then division of manuscripts had remained almost exclusively a collection of manuscripts illustrative of American history, politics, economics and culture. Minassian’s gifts thus represented a major landmark in the Library’s collection development history.

In 1931, Minassian placed in the Library as a loan his collection illustrating Near Eastern bookmaking. In preparation for an oriental bookmaking exhibition of these materials, he came personally to work with Library staff to unpack, sort, and prepare captions of exhibition materials.

The Library acquired this collection in 1937. It is a comprehensive collection of rare and original specimens of exquisite workmanship, pertaining to the development of writing and the book arts from the fourth to the 18th centuries in the Middle East. This remarkable collection covers an important field in the history of bookmaking. The Library could not have developed such a collection piecemeal.

Between 1929 and 1938, the Library also procured manuscripts and rare materials in English, French, Greek, and Latin from Minassian. But it was his collection of Near Eastern manuscripts and rare materials that laid a solid foundation for the continuing development of the Library’s Near Eastern collections. In 1938, the Library made a black and white photographic record of all the Near Eastern items, as well as some Indo-Persian manuscripts and handcrafts in the Minassian collection.

An elaborate display of brightly enameled flowers highlights this lush 18th-century Islamic book binding from the Kirkor Minassian collection.

In 1945, the Near Eastern manuscripts acquired from Minassian were supplemented by a corps of approximately 1,300 manuscripts and 3,700 books assembled by Shaykh Mahmud al-Imam al- Mansuri, professor of religion at the al-Azhar University in Cairo, purchased by the Library. Fast forward to the 1970s – after several Library reorganization efforts, the African and Middle Eastern Division was established in 1978 and has since become home to most of Minassian’s Near Eastern manuscripts. Today, the Minassian collection at the Library continues to be one of the finest in the world, and Minassian has become an indispensable part of the Library’s history.