Library of Congress's Blog, page 160

Jewish American Heritage: A Surviving Text

Title page of the first of nineteen volumes of the Talmud. The drawing at the bottom of the page shows a Nazi labor camp lined with barbed wire; the image at the top portrays palm trees and a panorama of the Holy Land.

May marks Jewish American Heritage Month, and this year’s theme, designated by the Jewish American Heritage Month Coalition, honors the 100th anniversary of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).

From its founding in 1914 to aid starving Jews in Palestine and Europe during World War I to life-saving rescues during war years to settling immigrants in search of freedom, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) has worked to aid Jewish communities.

After World War II ended, JDC began vast relief efforts to serve the hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors worldwide, including Displaced Persons camps in Europe and immigrating survivors to the new State of Israel.

The Library of Congress has a complete copy (in 19 volumes) of an entire Talmud printed in the American Zone just after World War II in a Displaced Persons camp that had formerly been a concentration camp. The edition, often called “The Survivors’ Talmud,” was printed by the JDC, with the active help of the United States Army.

The Talmud (literally, “the study” or “the learning”) is the chief cornerstone of mainstream Judaism. It comprises a huge compendium of legal traditions going back to Jewish antiquity. It was transmitted orally from generation to generation until around 500 A.D., when Jewish sages in Babylonia – then the chief center of world Jewry – committed it to writing. The first complete printed set was accomplished in Venice, between 1521 to 1523, by printer Daniel Bomberg.

Immediately after the liberation of the concentration camps, the survivors tried to rebuild their lives and look to the future. One of their first priorities was to reconstruct their cultural life, so schoolbooks, religious texts, newspapers and periodicals began to be published soon after the camps were liberated.

The most ambitious of these projects was the publication of a full size folio edition of the Babylonian Talmud in 19 volumes. There was an agreement signed in September 1946 by U.S. Army Gen. Joseph T. McNarney and the JDC for a set of the Talmud to be produced under the auspices of the Army. It took longer than expected to produce because of the shortage of paper and the difficulty of finding a complete set of the Talmud in Germany at the time. Eventually it was printed in Heidelberg in 1948 and is the only Talmud to have been published by a national government. Ironically, it was printed by the Carl Winter Printing Plant in Heidelberg, which had previously printed Nazi propaganda. According to the exhibition catalogue “Printing the Talmud: From Bomberg to Schottenstein” from Yeshiva Univeristy Museum in New York, only 100 copies were printed.

From the first volume of the Survivors’ Talmud: “In 1946 we turned to the American Army Commander to assist us in the publication of the Talmud. In all the years of exile it has often happened that various governments and forces have burned Jewish books. Never did any publish them for us. This is the first time in Jewish history that a government has helped in the publication of the Talmud, which is the source of our being and the length of our days. The Army of the United States saved us from death, protects us in this land and through their aid does the Talmud appear again in Germany.”

Each volume of the Talmud also included this dedication: “This edition of the Talmud is dedicated to the United States Army. The army played a major role in the rescue of the Jewish people from total annihilation and after the defeat of Hitler bore the major burden of sustaining the DPs [displaced persons] of the Jewish faith. This special edition of the Talmud published in the very land where, but a short time ago, everything Jewish and of Jewish inspiration was anathema, will remain a symbol of the indestructibility of the Torah. The Jewish DPs will never forget the generous impulses and the unprecedented humanitarianism of the American forces, to whom they owe so much.”

For a look into more of the Library’s Jewish history and cultural collections, visit www.jewishheritagemonth.gov.

(Ann Brener, Hebraic area specialist in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division, contributed to this blog post.)

National Recording Registry: Open to Your Nominations

(The following is a guest post by Steve Leggett, program coordinator for the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress.)

In the weeks since announcing the annual 25 additions to the National Recording Registry the Library has been asked a few questions about rap and hip-hop and its representation on the list. These questions are valid and important to explore.

The 2013 list of 25 additions announced earlier this month did not include a recording in the rap and hip-hop genre. However, the genre has been represented on the registry since the registry’s very first list of 50 recordings was announced in January 2003. In that year, “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was among recordings including Orson Welles’ radio drama “War of the Worlds” (1938), President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s D-Day radio address (1944) and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963).

The fact that those important and diverse sound recordings stand shoulder to shoulder on the same list is indicative of what the registry is about, and indeed illustrates the very important role sound recordings have played in our collective memory and consciousness since the very first recordings were captured in 1853.

With respect to rap and hip-hop, in addition to “The Message”, the registry also includes Sugar Hill’s 1979 “Rapper’s Delight” – widely credited with launching the genre – plus three others for a total of five. That means of the 17 music recordings in the Registry that date from 1979 or later, about 30 percent represent the rap genre, including the most contemporary recording in the entire registry, Tupac Shakur’s 1995 “Dear Mama.”

It is important to understand that the National Recording Registry is not a “best of music” list. Although much attention each year tends to focus on popular music, the registry is about sound recordings of all kinds – from political speeches to historic firsts, all deserving recognition and preservation.

Of course the registry includes music, but it also showcases Thomas Edison’s recording of 1888 for a talking doll prototype; 1890 recordings of Passamaquoddy Indians – considered the first field recordings; Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Exposition Speech (1906 recreation); 1917′s the Bubble Book – the first book/record recorded especially for children; the first transatlantic radio broadcast (1925); the first official transatlantic telephone conversation (1927); Charles Lindbergh’s arrival in Washington, DC (1927); FDR’s fireside chats (1933-44); Neil Armstrong’s broadcast from the moon; and many other historic recordings.

You can view the entire list here.

The process for selecting new additions includes review of public nominations, and active discussions and review by the advisory National Recording Preservation Board, featuring representatives from the recorded sound, preservation and music industries.  The Board advises the Librarian of Congress on national preservation policy as well as the National Recording Registry.

Of course, selecting the recordings each year involves a lot of discourse and argument about current representation of various genres, time periods, artists and key cultural and historical themes.

Keep in mind, the National Recording Registry represents a very small slice of the Library’s collection of more than 3.5 million sound recordings or the 46 million recordings held in U.S. public institutions according to a 2005 survey.  Many of these recordings are in dire need of preservation, an alarming fact highlighted in the 2013 landmark national recorded sound plan published by the Library.  The good news is that virtually any published recording of a song registered for copyright with deposited copies is in the Library’s permanent collections: so much, however, yet remains to be preserved and made available

But the registry, in essence, represents a special category of recordings the Library would seek out and ensure are in our collections in the most pristine form available.  So we do like to think of it as an “honor” or recognition of the best of the best in addition to spotlighting countless other worthy recordings.  From that standpoint we welcome the fact that critics are looking, well, critically at what is on the list and what is not. Keep that dialogue going!

With only 25 additions each year, the selection process is mighty challenging. And there is no doubt the number of recordings that should be on the registry far exceeds the number of recordings already on the registry.

Along with rap songs that have been mentioned in recent blogs and the public – works by artists such as Lauryn Hill, Run-DMC, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Eminem and Kanye West — this vast treasure trove of cultural importance awaiting recognition consists of radio broadcasts, technological breakthroughs, advertisements, ambient sounds and well-known standards by a stunning litany of music legends.

If you believe rap or hip-hop – or any other genre – is under-represented on the list, please nominate a recording…or several. We are accepting nominations for the next list here.

Remember the recordings must be at least 10 years old. We look forward to hearing from you!

A Journey to the Northwest Frontier in 1783: The Journal of George McCully

(The following is a guest post by Julie Miller, early American specialist in the Manuscript Division.)

People who visit the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress often ask where our collections come from. Sometimes the answers are surprising. This is true for a journal kept in 1783 by a Revolutionary War veteran from Pennsylvania named George McCully. The journal, which is currently featured in a Library of Congress exhibition, “Mapping a New Nation: Abel Buell’s Map of the United States, 1784,” came to the Library in a roundabout way.

Many years after McCully’s death in 1793 his widow, Ann McCully, submitted an application for a widow’s pension to the War Department’s Pension Bureau in Washington D.C. To support her application she included the journal. After Ann McCully received her pension in 1837, her application, with the journal, was filed away as entry 7-411 in the Pension Bureau’s “Widow File.” There it remained until 1906, when an official named C.M. Bryant realized that after three-quarters of a century the journal had shed its original function and acquired a new one as a historical document. In 1909 the Pension Bureau transferred the journal to the Library of Congress, where it soon caught the eye of Detroit lawyer and local historian Clarence Monroe Burton. He published it in The Magazine of History in 1910.

McCully’s journal is a record of his trip from Pittsburgh to Detroit in the summer of 1783.  McCully went as a companion to Ephraim Douglass, who had been sent by Secretary of War Benjamin Lincoln on a mission to the Indians of the Northwest frontier. Like McCully, Douglass was a Pennsylvanian and a veteran of the Revolutionary War. Secretary Lincoln may have chosen him because he knew him as his aide-de-camp during the war, but Douglass also had the necessary skills: he was an Indian trader (as McCully may also have been), and he knew his way along the trade routes. He also knew the languages of the tribes he was sent to meet with.

Douglass’s instructions were to tell these tribes – many of whom had sided with the British – that now that a treaty ending the war was about to be signed, they would have to accept American sovereignty. This message would be a bitter one for these people to receive. Although many had been important players in the war and all would be profoundly affected by the redistribution of land that followed, they had been excluded from the treaty negotiations then in progress.

As a primary source McCully’s journal has some problems. It is a copy – probably made by Ann McCully – and an imperfect one. A few dates are mixed up, and the journal’s account of the trip goes only from June 7, when Douglass and McCully left Pittsburgh, to July 4, when they were just outside Fort Detroit. But Douglass’s August 18, 1783, report to Secretary Lincoln shows that the little delegation reached Detroit, visited the British commander there then continued on to the British forts at Niagara and Oswego before returning to Princeton, New Jersey, where Congress was meeting. (Are you wondering what Congress was doing in Princeton? See here.)

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“Indian of the Nation of the Shawanoes.” 1826. Prints and Photographs Division.

McCully’s vivid descriptions make up for the journal’s shortcomings. Despite his sometimes iffy spelling and punctuation, he brings the landscape of the Pennsylvania and Ohio wilderness and its people to life. McCully shows how difficult this landscape was to travel through, even for those who knew the way. The trading path they took from Pittsburgh, where they both lived, was “intricate” and “impossible to follow” since “the bushes were lofty and in many places enterlocked in each other.” Near a place with the picturesque name of Hell Town they “met with intolerable swamps and thickets,” then “lost the road and lost ourselves.” McCully describes a very wet landscape, full of streams and rivers to cross, swamps to get lost in and plenty of rain. On several occasions they had to get themselves and their horses over deep, fast-moving rivers. At Mohican John’s Town in Ohio, heavy rain forced them to spend an extra night with “a large swarm of bees . . . They were our companions during our stay at the place.”

McCully also documented the social complexity of life on the frontier. This was a place where plenty of Indians spoke French, the result of centuries of interaction with French explorers, trappers and missionaries, and it was not unusual to meet white people who wore feathers in their hair. The Delaware, Shawnee and Wyandot lived in this area. So did traders, Moravian missionaries, settlers taken captive by Indian tribes and the agents the British used to manage relations with their Indian allies. This multilingual blend of cultures sometimes produced confusion. McCully describes how one evening when he and Douglass were camped near a stream they heard an Indian call. Douglass replied in the same language, asking the caller to “come up to us,” apparently so fluently that when the Indian arrived he was surprised to find a white man. McCully tells what happened: “Seeing him much alarmed Mr. Douglass and I stepped to him and took him by the hand, told our business, took every method to dissipate his fear.” The Indian, his two companions and McCully and Douglass then spent the evening “very sociably together.”

At a Delaware settlement on the Sandusky River in Ohio, McCully and Douglass met several captive settlers. One woman captive they met there “as soon as she saw us burst into tears and began to make a complaint of ill treatment as though we would have relieved her.” Another “behaved with more prudence and bore her misfortune well.” McCully’s surprising lack of sympathy for these women may be the result of what he knew and what historians have documented about the mixed experiences of white settlers taken captive by Indians. Some, especially women and children, were adopted by their captors, adapted to Indian life and chose to stay, even when they had the chance to return home. Eunice Williams, captured as a 7-year-old from Deerfield, Mass., in 1704, and Mary Jemison, captured in Pennsylvania as a 15-year-old in 1758, are two examples of this phenomenon. McCully may have seen such acculturated captives and reasoned that misery was not a given.

Frances and Almira Hall, taken captive by the Fox and Sauk at Indian Creek, Illinois, 1832. Their experience may have been similar to that of the captives George McCully met on the Sandusky River in Ohio in 1783.

Just as Indian captives could become hybrid figures – at home in more than one world – so could the agents who worked for the British Indian Department. One of these was Matthew Elliot, who McCully and Douglass encountered on their journey. Before the Revolution, according to Clarence Burton, Douglass and Elliot – both Indian traders around Pittsburgh – were “intimate acquaintances.” But early in the war Elliot left Pittsburgh to side with the British while Douglass fought on the American side. Elliot, who lived with the Shawnees and worked for the British at Detroit, developed a fearsome reputation among the Americans. Alonzo Sabine, author of “The American Loyalists; or, Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in the War of the Revolution” (1847) noted his “revengeful disposition and infamous deeds.”

Sabine may have been indulging in colorful hyperbole, but Douglass does appear to have mistrusted Elliot. At Sandusky, Douglass wrote him, asking him to invite the Shawnees to meet with him there. “Though I promised to myself very little from this Letter,” Douglass reported to Lincoln, “I knew it could do no possible harm–and though I did not hope he would give himself any trouble to serve me, I thought the possibility that the compliment of it might prevent his opposition worth the trouble of writing it.” Instead of delivering Douglass’s message to his Shawnee hosts, Elliot, taking orders from Detroit, obstructed him as Douglass guessed he might. After Douglass and McCully left Sandusky for Detroit, they met Elliot on the road. He had been sent from Detroit to conduct them there and, McCully recorded in his journal, “to prevent our speaking with the Indians.”

Joseph Brant, engraving of a portrait by George Romney, ca. 1776. Ephraim Douglass met with Joseph Brant at Fort Niagara, which was in British hands in 1783.

In the end, Douglass’s mission was not a success. Everywhere he went Indian leaders politely rejected his message. The British commanders at forts Detroit, Niagara and Oswego, wanting to maintain their relations with their Indian allies and unwilling to give up their forts (which they held onto for more than a decade after the Treaty of Paris), were not interested in helping. At Fort Detroit commander Arent Schuyler Depeyster (a New York loyalist) told Douglass that “he could not consent that any thing should be said to the Indians relative to the boundary of the United States.” But at Fort Niagara the great Mohawk leader Joseph Brant defied the resistance of the British commander there and came to speak with Douglass. In his report, Douglass described how, in an evening of “friendly argument” Brant “insisted that they would make a point of having them [Indian lands] secured before they would enter into any farther or other Treaty.” Brant later left for Canada, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Even though Douglass’s mission didn’t succeed, it produced one lasting prize, long hidden in the Widow File at the Pension Bureau: George McCully’s perceptive and revealing journal, which shows the land and the original people of Pennsylvania Ohio, and the Great Lakes as they were in the summer of 1783.

“Mapping a New Nation: Abel Buell’s Map of the United States, 1784,” is in the North Gallery, first floor, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, Washington DC.  “Across a New Nation,” a section of the exhibition’s computer interactive, is based on George McCully’s journal.

The Library in History: The John Adams Building at 75

The Library of Congress John Adams Building. ca. 1939. Prints and Photographs Division.

Seventy-five years ago, the Library opened a second building on Capitol Hill to house its growing collections.

With a collection of more than 3.5 million items, former Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam reported to Congress in 1926 that the nearly completed bookstack “will not be likely to take care of the accessions beyond the coming decade.” Thus began his push for an Annex Building.

In 1935, Congress approved and President Herbert Hoover signed a total congressional appropriation providing $8,226,457 for the construction of a second building to be located east of the existing building on land that had been acquired in 1928.

Faced in Georgian marble, the building is a wonderful example of the Art Deco design movement, which first appeared in France after World War I. Various artisans and manufacturers contributed to the beauty of the building. The building was constructed under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, a federal agency that employed millions of unemployed people during the Depression. The project was listed in President Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act, which authorized a variety of public works.

When the building opened to the public on Jan. 3, 1939, it was called “the Annex.” On April 13, 1976, in a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial marking the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, President Gerald Ford signed into law the act to change the name of the Annex Building to the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building.The original Library of Congress structure was then dubbed “The Main Building.”

The South Reading Room of the Annex Building is a tribute to Thomas Jefferson and was referred to as the Thomas Jefferson Reading Room. His image is captured in a lunette overlooking the reading room.

The designation of the Annex as the Thomas Jefferson Building was short-lived. In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson had authorized a congressional appropriation of $75 million to construct a third Library of Congress building to be named for nation’s fourth president. In 1980, the James Madison Memorial Building opened to the public and Congress passed a law that changed the names of both existing Library buildings. The main building was named the Thomas Jefferson Building and the Annex became the John Adams Building, in honor of second president John Adams, who, on April 24, 1800, signed the law that established a library for Congress in 1800.

Adams Building doors. Photo by Shealah Craighead.

The building’s classical architecture features a series of large bronze doors depicting the history of the written word in high-relief sculpted figures designed by American artist Lee Lawrie, who is best known for the architectural sculptures on and around New York’s Rockefeller Center.

The doors, located at the entrance to the Adams building, showcase various deities and mythological characters such as Hermes, who was attributed with inventing the alphabet; Odin, the originator of the science of written communication in Norse mythology; and Quetzalcoatl, revered as the inventor of books in Aztec culture.

Under the auspices of the Architect of the Capitol, the bronze doors to the John Adams Building were replaced recently with code-complaint sculpted glass panels mirroring the original bronze door sculptures. The Washington Glass studio and Fireart Glass of Portland, Ore., created the new doors.

The following is an article featured in the March-April 2014 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM, now available for download here. You can also view the archives of the Library’s former publication from 1993 to 2011.

 

214 Years Young

The Library of Congress celebrates its 214th birthday today. Founded on April 24, 1800, thanks to an appropriation approved by Pres. John Adams of $5,000 for the purchase of “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.” What started with a whopping 740 books and three maps has evolved to more than 158 million items, including more than 36 million books and other print materials, 5.5 million maps, 69 million manuscripts, 13.7 million photographs, 6.7 million pieces of sheet music and 3.5 million recordings.

Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford standing amid stacks of books and library shelves. Prints and Photographs Division.

Thomas Jefferson took a keen interest in the Library and its collection while he was president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. In fact, he approved the first law defining the role and functions of the new institution, including the creation of the post of Librarian of Congress. When the British army invaded the city of Washington in August 1814 and burned the Capitol, where the nascent 3,000-volume Library of Congress was located, Jefferson sold his personal library of 6,487 volumes to replace what had been lost.

The Library was housed in the Capitol until 1867. Sixth Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford (1864–97) was the first to propose that the Library be moved to a dedicated building. He also was instrumental in establishing the copyright law of 1870. That year Spofford sent Rep. Thomas A. Jenckes, chair of the Patent and Copyright Committee, a list of reasons U. S. copyright activities should be centered at the Library. When Pres. Ulysses S. Grant signed such a bill, a flood of copyright deposits – books, maps, music, pamphlets – filled the small space assigned to the Library in the Capitol. Overflow was moved to the Capitol attics and along the basement corridors. By mid-decade, Spofford was putting volumes along the walls of committee rooms, down the first- and second- floor corridors and against the public staircases.

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William Boyd notes in his journal, “Everything moving along in 1s class shape. Men all working on high pressure …” Photo by Amanda Reynolds.

The Thomas Jefferson Building was built from 1886 to 1897 in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Superintendent of Construction Bernard Green and architect Thomas Casey planned and commissioned the amazing variety and type of sculpture in the Jefferson Building. William Boyd organized much of the sculpture created in workshops – both marble carving and stucco molding – housed in the building. Boyd documented the cost of materials, time and workers involved in creating the hundreds of sculptural details, such as column capitals and figures like the eagle. More than 50 American artisans contributed their talents to the symbolic sculptural and painted decoration of the building.

Men cutting stone decorations for the Library of Congress. Prints and Photographs Division.

 

 

 

 

 

Green and Casey selected noted artists for major sculptural works in the building. Among the commissions, Philip Martiny’s cherubs along the grand stairwell and Olin Warner’s spandrel group “The Students,” located directly across the great hall from the main bronze doors, were carved at the Piccirilli Brothers marble carving studios in New York City. Warner’s bronze doors depicting memory and imagination were cast at the John Thompson forge shop in New York. Green recorded the daily progress on the Jefferson Building in his Journal of Operations, including in 1897 that Warner’s “The Students” had arrived from Piccirilli Bros. and was ready to install.

In his Journal of Operations, Bernard Green notes the arrival of Olin Warner’s spandrels. Photo by Amanda Reynolds.

On Nov. 1, 1897, at 9 a.m., the new Library building (now known as the Thomas Jefferson Building) officially opened to the public – 25 years after Spofford had begun his entreaty. Several days later, the transfer of Library materials – some 800 tons – into the new building was completed.

The Library continued to expand its Capitol Hill campus in 1928 and 1971 1957 , with the addition of the John Adams and James Madison Memorial buildings, respectively. You can take a virtual tour of all three here.

Today, the Library’s Hill campus has multiple reading rooms and exhibit spaces available to the public. In 2013, approximately 1.6 million people visited the Library. The Library’s website was visited more than 84 million times that year. Offsite facilities include the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va; vast modular storage at Ft. Meade; and numerous international offices.

For more information on the history of the Library of Congress and its buildings, see “Jefferson’s Legacy: A Brief History of the Library of Congress”  and “On These Walls: Inscriptions and Quotations in the Buildings of the Library of Congress.”

Searching the Library’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog for “Library of Congress” brings forth numerous images of the construction of the Jefferson Building and its architectural drawings, as well as vivid color photographs of the Library’s Capitol Hill campus and buildings interiors.

Builders at work on the rusticated stone walls of the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building during its construction. Sept. 10, 1890. Prints and Photographs Division.

WDL Marks 5 Years of Sharing Cultural Treasures with Globe

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

Director John Van Oudenaren delivers a presentation about the World Digital Library to Kenyan librarians, archivists and government officials in Nairobi in 2013. Photo by Pamela Howard-Reguindin,

The idea was as big as the planet itself: Gather and digitize the globe’s  cultural treasures, assemble them  on one website and make them available to the world for free and in multiple languages. Such a project, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in proposing it, would bring people together by “celebrating the uniqueness of different cultures in a single, shared global undertaking.”

Today, the World Digital Library – the international project inspired by Billington and led by the Library of Congress – will mark its fifth anniversary of online operation.

The World Digital Library launched on April 21, 2009, with 26 global partners in 18 countries and some 1,200 items in its online collections. Today, the network has 181 partners – mostly archives, libraries and museums – in 80 countries that collectively have contributed more than 10,000 manuscripts, maps, books, prints, photographs, journals, newspapers, sound recordings and motion pictures.

The online collections contain a wide range of great primary cultural and historical documents: The U.S. Constitution, the Japanese work considered the world’s first novel, the magnificent illustrated Bible of Borso d’Este, ancient Arabic works on algebra, a 2,200-year-old papyrus fragment of Euripides’ play “Orestes,” an African rock painting of an antelope that is perhaps 8,000 years old.

The project’s appeal, director John Van Oudenaren said, lies in the breadth of the collection and the high quality of the objects and presentation.

“What’s really been striking is how the libraries – some very great libraries – have put forward their top things,” Van Oudenaren said. “They’ve put forward fantastic, rare things. It’s kind of astounding what people send.”

Those fantastic, rare things span the globe: The collection items represent countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and 192 nations in between.

Part of the World Digital Library’s groundbreaking mission lies in the presentation: Each item is provided with consistent metadata; translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish; and presented with high-resolution, deep-zoom photos that reveal even the paper fibers in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Those images – now nearly 500,000 in number – allow visitors to inspect each note of “The Magic Flute” in Mozart’s original handwritten score; navigate each Mexico City street via a map drawn just after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs; or examine each calligraphic stroke in a Holy Qur’an from Iran’s national library.

“The World Digital Library is a very intensive, value-added project,” Van Oudenaren said. “There are digital-library projects of all kinds. Some focus on aggregating metadata and putting a lot of content online without really upgrading. World Digital Library is different. We take content at different levels of enrichment in terms of metadata and raise it to a single level.”

The site’s audience is as global as its content. In its first five years, the World Digital Library attracted nearly 30 million users from 231 international jurisdictions around the world, drawing visitors from continent-spanning countries (Russia, Australia) and tiny island territories (Kiribati, Wallis and Futuna) alike. Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the United States and China provide the most visitors, and Spanish, English and Portuguese are the most-used languages. Increasingly, visitors come from Arabic-speaking countries across Africa and the Middle East: Arabic now ranks fourth in use on the site.

Going forward, the World Digital Library aims to expand the depth and geographic range of its collections and partner institutions – ideally gaining at least one partner in each country.

“We’ve got partners in 80 countries, but there are 194 countries in the world so it still leaves an awful lot of countries we’d like to recruit,” Van Oudenaren said.

The project also helps countries with limited digitization capacity contribute. The World Digital Library has established digitization centers in Baghdad, Cairo and Kampala, Uganda.

“We try to use the World Digital Library as a vehicle to help developing-country institutions participate,” Van Oudenaren said. “We’d like to do more of that.”

Over the past few years, the World Digital Library has made steady improvements to the user interface: The site now features a better page viewer, for example, and full text search of both the metadata and the English, Arabic and French books in the collection.

A major upgrade also is planned for later this year. The World Digital Library will relaunch as a beta site with a redesigned interface, interactive maps, and thematic timelines and in a form more user-friendly for mobile devices.

The mission, however, will remain the same as the one Billington first put forward nine years ago: making available the cultural treasures of the world and putting them online for free for educators, scholars and the public.

“It’s been wonderful to show all this great cultural material to the world,” Van Oudenaren said. “People have fascinating things. You just don’t know what’s out there until you start bringing it together. “It’s been a huge ambassador on the part of the Library.”

 

Adiós, Gabo

One of the most popular features in the Library of Congress Pavilion at the Library’s National Book Festival is a whiteboard on which you can write the name of a book.  Some years we ask for your favorite book.  Some years we ask what book shaped the world.  People stand a few feet back, ponder, look at what others write, and then step forward and put up their title.

Every year, for me, it’s the same: “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, a native of Colombia and master of modern letters who died on Thursday in Mexico City at age 87.

Books Populi at the Library’s 2013 National Book Festival

In my lifetime of reading – a lifetime made wonderful by reading – it is, quite simply, my favorite book.

I was assigned to read this towering novel by Prof. David Cusack at the University of Colorado back in the 1970s.  He was teaching a course in Latin American political science. It was odd to be assigned a novel as required reading for a PolySci course, but Prof. Cusack—who had spent a lot of time in Latin America—explained that it would help us understand a different worldview from our own, a different lens for looking at reality.  It would help us understand how things were different there.

And so, I tackled this assigned book – and was swept along as if I had fallen into the Amazon in flood.  I ripped through that book as if my own future were written in it. Many books take us to “other worlds” but this one – this one was literally otherworldly (Márquez’s style is often referred to as “magical realism”). I absolutely loved it – I read it again, immediately, bought extra copies and began giving them to other people I cared about, including my father, a newspaper columnist.

He liked it so well that in his annual column thanking various people, he thanked me for pointing him to it, and in doing so tipped about 250,000 Denver Post readers off to this astounding modern classic.

You may also enjoy many of this Nobel-winning writer’s other books as well – I enjoyed “Love in the Time of Cholera” and the novella “No One Writes to the Colonel.”  Márquez, known as “Gabo” to his friends, wrote many novels and stories, and we have a recording of him reading from his own work in the Library’s Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape, in the Hispanic Division.

Do I remember anything else about that political science course? No. But I maintain a fond memory of Prof. Cusack, who was also involved in early efforts to introduce the United States to the grain known as quinoa.  On a trip to Bolivia to work with quinoa farmers, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was fatally shot.

So, adiós, Master Márquez, and rest in peace, Prof. Cusack.  Together, you gave us a great gift.

 

Letter to the Editor

(The following is a guest post by Barbara Bair, historian in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.)

Colonel Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, Battle of San Juan. Prints and Photographs Division.

While life posed many setbacks for Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919), he proved himself a man who met challenges and seized his opportunities. When it came to the Spanish American War in 1898, Roosevelt carefully devised public acclaim as a manly military leader of the First Volunteer Cavalry. He rode that reputation all the way to the governorship of New York and then the White House. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, meanwhile, evolved from actual soldiers participating in warfare into heroic status in the American popular imagination (and Wild West shows) as a rabble-rousing courageous band of westerners and easterners who triumphed at San Juan Hill.

A letter recently acquired by the Library of Congress’ Manuscript Division sheds light on some of the details behind the Rough Riders’ story. Modern historians continue to look backward and debate the military prowess of the regiment. Roosevelt himself noted the general confusions and lack of preparedness of the United States War Department in his diary. The letter shows that Roosevelt felt moved to personally respond to aspersions being cast specifically against his men. He wrote to defend their honor at a time when they were fresh from the victory that brought them fame.

The two-page letter, marked “(Private and not for publication),” was composed on a typewriter at headquarters camp for the 2nd Brigade, Cavalry Division, near Santiago de Cuba on Aug. 4, 1898. It was signed by Roosevelt and edited in his hand. It was directed with characteristic Roosevelt energy to Col. William C. Church, founder and editor of the Army and Navy Journal.

Roosevelt wrote to contest certain allegations that were being aired in military circles claiming that the Rough Riders’ performance had been less than stellar. Among the charges that Roosevelt termed “baseless slander” were the ideas that the Rough Riders had been ambushed, engaged in ill-advised fame-seeking from which they required rescue or were guilty of friendly fire. Roosevelt proclaims these rumors to be “absurd falsehoods” and attributes them to envy on the part of members of a rival volunteer unit from the 71st New York.

At issue was, in part, who to believe about the chaotic happenings of war. Roosevelt questions Church’s failure to fact check the reports with a correspondent in the field and lends his own account of what happened in the unit’s two major encounters.

Excerpts from Theodore Roosevelt to Colonel Church, August 5, 1898. Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress:

“The Rough Riders, as I think any regular will tell you, were the only volunteers who deserved to rank with the regulars in point of fighting capacity . . . . As for being influenced by love of notoriety, that is an accusation I shan’t answer . . . . At the fight of July first we led the three assaults in which we were engaged, none but regulars being with us, and at the end of the day I was in the extreme front and the men under me were nearer the enemy than any other part of our line …”

Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy when the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898. Roosevelt strongly favored American military intervention against Spain in the Cuban insurgency, especially after the sinking of the battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor in February. Eager to participate first-hand in military combat, he resigned his administrative post to help recruit a volunteer unit that would combine the two social worlds of most interest to him: cowboys from the West and adventuresome Ivy League athletes from the East.

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Wm. H. West’s Big Minstrel Jubilee: “The Charge of San Juan Hill.” Ca. 1899. Prints and Photographs Division.

Arriving in Cuba in June, the volunteers, who had trained in San Antonio, Texas, and traveled via Tampa, Fla., saw their first battle on June 24 against Spanish fortifications in mountainous jungle terrain at Las Guásimas. Eye-witness correspondent Richard Harding Davis termed the fighting in the difficult surroundings more hot and hasty than he could ever have imagined. Their renown came on July 1 with the battle of San Juan Heights, in which Roosevelt pressed to the forefront as senior in command and led the infantry charge on Kettle Hill. The Spanish were meanwhile challenged by sea as well as by land. The U.S. Navy won the decisive naval battle at Santiago harbor on July 3, and the city was surrendered on July 17. While some had their qualms about both the virtue and the conduct of the conflict and of the United States’ reach into Imperialism, many Americans responded like Secretary of State John Hay, who termed the conflict “a splendid little war.”  Roosevelt soon codified his own heroics in his 1899 war memoir, “The Rough Riders,” and in copious coverage in the popular press.

E.L. Doctorow Awarded American Fiction Prize

E. L. Doctorow, author of such critically acclaimed novels as “Ragtime,” “World’s Fair,” “Billy Bathgate,” “The March” and his current novel, “Andrew’s Brain,” is the second recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. He will receive the award during this year’s National Book Festival, scheduled for Aug. 30 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

The annual Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction is meant to honor an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but for its originality of thought and imagination. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something about the American experience. Winning the award last year was author Don DeLillo.

“I was a child who read everything I could get my hands on,” Doctorow said. “Eventually, I asked of a story not only what was to happen next, but how is this done? How am I made to live from words on a page? And so I became a writer myself.

“But is there a novelist who doesn’t live with self-doubt? The high honor of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction confers a blessed moment of peace and resolution.”

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington chose Doctorow based on the recommendation of a panel of distinguished authors and prominent literary critics. ”E. L. Doctorow is our very own Charles Dickens, summoning a distinctly American place and time, channeling our myriad voices. Each book is a vivid canvas, filled with color and drama. In each, he chronicles an entirely different world.”

Doctorow’s career spans more than 50 years. He has written a dozen novels, starting with “Welcome to Hard Times” (1960). He has received the National Book Award for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In addition to awards for his individual works, his body of work has been honored with the National Humanities Medal (1998), the New York Writers Hall of Fame (2012), the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction (2012) and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters of the National Book Foundation (2013).

The Prize for American Fiction follows in the path of the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for fiction: John Grisham (2009), Isabel Allende (2010), Toni Morrison (2011) and Philip Roth (2012). In 2008, the Library presented Pulitzer-Prize winner Herman Wouk with a lifetime achievement award in the writing of fiction. This honor inspired the Library to grant subsequent fiction-writing awards.

 

Experts’ Corner: Image Researching

The following is an article featured in the March-April 2014 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM, now available for download here. You can also view the archives of the Library’s former publication from 1993 to 2011.

Athena Angelos. Photo by Shealah Craighead.

Athena Angelos, image researcher for many Library of Congress publications, discusses the process of visual reference work.

How did you prepare for a career in image research?

I’ve always loved photography and looking for things. If you’ve lost a pearl in a white shag carpet, you should call me. When I was about 10 years old, my father let me start using his WWII-era Leica camera, which he purchased from the PX. I went on to get a bachelor of science degree in fine art at the University of Wisconsin with an emphasis on photography. When I returned to Washington, D.C., after college a friend put me in touch with a book packager who needed someone to “look for old photos at the Library of Congress.” I had never heard of picture research but this sounded more appealing than the house-painting I was doing at the time.

Looking back on my career, I have to mention that my success in the field and my enjoyment of the work has been dependent on the assistance I have received from many talented Library of Congress reference librarians, curators, catalogers and other specialists.

You have researched images for a number of Library of Congress publications. Can you tell us about those projects?

I was very fortunate that my first client, a book packager, had contracts with the Library of Congress Publishing Office for four multi-volume series of books. This provided me with about three years of work and was an excellent training period to learn about the Library’s vast array of materials and how to access them. The four series covered Colonial America, The American West, The U.S. Presidents and the Civil War. Over the years, I’ve conducted image research for many other Library publications such as “The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference,” “The Library of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War,” “The Library of Congress World War II Companion,” “World War II 365 Days,” and many calendars such as those in the “Women Who Dare” Series. My most recent project was image research for “Football Nation: Four Hundred Years of America’s Game.”

Can you tell us about your research process for “Football Nation”?

The process of working on “Football Nation” with author Susan Reyburn of the Library’s Publishing Office was dynamic and fun. We laughed a lot—quietly, of course–in the various reading rooms. Working from Susan’s book outline and several lengthy lists of “must-have” images and topics, together we set about to discover anything and everything relating to football in the Library’s collections. This resulted in a preliminary visual file containing no less than 4,000 images, which we later edited down to 390. As with all Library of Congress publishing projects, we tried to include as many “never before seen” materials from as many different divisions and collections as possible. We also like to use a diverse range of formats: photos, drawings, cartoons, books, maps, sheet music, etc. I’m very pleased with the book and grateful to have had another rich research adventure, in such good company.

How have developments in image technology changed the field of photographic research?

The remarkable developments in technology have changed how all research is done. Image research has evolved from fifth-generation photocopies—snail-mailed—to digital images snapped on a camera and sent immediately to smart phones. This ongoing evolution in the technology, along with researching such a variety of subjects for different clients and purposes has kept me interested and engaged in image research.