Library of Congress's Blog, page 75

New for research! LibGuides

Today, we want to give a heads-up to our researchers to make sure they know that the Library is part of LibGuides, where thousands of libraries post and share their research guides.

If you’re not already familiar: The guides show what’s available on a given subject, highlight key books, subscription databases and primary historical sources. They’re a great tool for researchers, from the beginner to the expert, particularly since the information has been vetted by a librarian. Better, LibGuides are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Here at the Library, you might have heard of our research guides referred to as bibliographies, subject overviews, webguides, or a virtual reference shelf. These guides (there are more than 50) cover a vast array of subjects: the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; American Realism; BREXIT; Halloween & Día de Muertos Resources; Native American History and Culture: Finding Pictures; Rosa Parks and so on. We are always updating these and adding new ones.

LibGuides has been so seamlessly implemented you probably haven’t noticed. In a Google search about a particular subject, for example, you’ll see the Library higher in your search results. Click on the link, and you’ll find our reference material. Experienced researchers, who might start a search at loc.gov, will also find the guides incorporated in the list of all the Library’s resources; no separate searching is needed.

Questions? Just hit the “Ask a Librarian” button on any guides to get friendly help.  Meanwhile, some frequent questions about research methods are answered below by our LibGuides coordinating team.

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Can a researcher ask that a new guide be created? How do librarians prepare these subject overviews?  Suggestions for new guides are welcome! Please send them to the Ask a Librarian service. Librarians start a new guide by outlining the topic, investigating the different types of resources available, and confirming which sources are reliable. Descriptive notes indicate the scope of a source or draw attention to a special feature. We’re sharing our best advice about where to locate useful information, whether you need an overview of a subject, tips for starting points, or comprehensive and exhaustive coverage.

The “Beginner Guides” series for law topics on In Custodia Legis and Law.gov look interesting, with more than 10 guides already released.  We want to create guides that help with daily life. To that end, we have recently published “Landlord-Tenant Law: A Beginner’s Guide,” “Neighbor Law: A Beginner’s Guide,” and “Small Claims Court: A Beginner’s Guide,”  “Legal Drafting: A Beginner’s Guide,” “Wills, Probate, and Advance Directives: A Beginner’s Guide.”

Why do you include old as well as new books, subscription databases, subject headings, and external websites in the guides?  As reference librarians, we include both historical and recent sources because it is important to provide researchers with broad and deep coverage of authoritative sources on a topic.  The research guides have links to subscription databases so that researchers are aware of ways to access thousands of sources, such as scholarly journal articles, historical and current newspapers and periodicals, auction records, art images, and much more.  Many of the research guides contain Library of Congress subject headings as a way to narrow and focus a user’s search in online catalogs. Links to important collections and items at external institutions are included to give researchers a wide array of resources.

Do I have to come to the Library of Congress?  No. Many of the sources are available in other libraries or online collections. For the subscription databases, rare books, and unique historical documents, please contact us for information about availability.

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LibGuides Working Group: Front, l-r: Debora Keysor, Laura Berberian, Barbara Bavis. Back, l-r: Elizabeth (Betsy) Fulford, Donna Brearcliffe.

How can I can find these guides?  You can start with an Internet search service, such as Google or Bing. Try a search for “13th amendment” and you’ll likely see “guides.loc.gov” early in the search results.  Or, if you are already on the Library of Congress website, any search will include the Library’s LibGuides publications.  Online collections and other Web pages at the Library also link directly to relevant LibGuides.

What else should researchers should know about using LibGuides?   Keep sending us your questions!  Every “research guide” from the Library of Congress includes an “Ask a Librarian” box for easy access to our reference librarians. We’re here to help you succeed with your research by email, in person, or by phone. Learn more: Mann, Thomas, 1948- The Oxford Guide to Library Research. Fourth edition. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, [2015]. Springshare. LibGuides Community.

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Howard University, Library, Team Up for New Internship Program

 

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Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden speaks at the AHHA ceremony April 22, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller.

One of the Library’s newest outreach programs to college students is the Archives, History, and Heritage Advanced Internship Program, which wrapped its first season this week. AHHA is a partnership between the Library and our hometown Howard University. It pairs students with Library staffers to work on projects that increase public access to the Library’s collections.

It’s modeled on the Library’s Junior Fellows Summer Internship program, and the student stipends for AAHA were provided by Craig and Diane Welburn, members of the Library’s James Madison Council. This year, we started with three students who worked 20 hours a week for three months.

 Jacquelyn Chin worked on the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation collection in the Music Division. Brittney Meadors worked on the Pete Welding Collection, as well as that of Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian, in the American Folklife Center. Keshad “Ife” Adeniyi worked on the papers of civil rights pioneer Ann Tanneyhill in the Manuscript Division.

“So much history of people of color is … lost, misplaced and not made accessible,” said Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, in a ceremony that concluded the program. Interns have the chance to “open up a treasure chest and be the person that is going to find that letter, that is going to find that film clip, that is going to find that recording … and make it accessible.”

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Ife Adeniyi works in the Manuscript Division, April 17, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Here, adding to the posts by his peers, Adeniyi writes of Tanneyhill’s passion for preserving her family’s story:

As a doctoral candidate in history at Howard University, my research is in the Civil War – more specifically, the experiences of fugitives fleeing southern plantations to Union occupied territory. They were labeled “contrabands.”  I’m focusing on the nature of impressment and how it was used against black people as the Union Army’s need for both laborers and soldiers intensified as the war dragged on. This requires extensive work in the archives. It’s actually what led Professor Nikki Taylor – chair of the Howard’s department 0f history — to tell me about the university’s program with the Library.

In my daily work here at the Library, I am identifying, arranging, and describing the Ann Tanneyhill papers. These have had a tremendous impact on me. For four decades, Ms. Tanneyhill (1906-2001), worked at the National Urban League headquarters, dedicating her life to improving the material conditions of African Americans. She began working for the League in 1928, and for years worked as the director of vocational guidance. Employment was a critical issue for activists during this period of the Great Migration, when 6 million blacks left the South in search of a better life. She worked tirelessly to find and develop employment opportunities for young people attempting to traverse many of the hardships that awaited black people once they relocated.

As I’ve sifted through her life’s work, I’ve found myself connecting with her on both a professional and personal level.

Professionally, as an activist and an advocate, I’ve worked with young people of color who are caught up in the criminal justice system. In prisons, jails and detention centers, I’ve taught classes on race, state violence, identity and classism, particularly as they relate to life inside those facilities. Ms. Tanneyhill’s long career has been an inspiration for me to continue that work.

Personally, it’s her family history that intrigues me. Her great-grandfather escaped from slavery in Louisiana and made his way to freedom in Nova Scotia. His son, William Grandison, settled in Massachusetts and became the first black member of a printer’s union. I was moved by a photoengraving of him that I found in the papers. That she held onto his picture underscored how important family pride and connections were to her. This motif became more prevalent as I combed through her collection. She really had a keen interest in documenting and preserving her family’s history.

I found this to be admirable, particularly considering my own family’s history. I grew up in Los Angeles amid sometimes difficult circumstances. Once, we were evicted. We put nearly all of our belongings – pictures, family documents — into storage. Later, when we could no longer pay the storage facility, all was lost. So much of our family story was just gone.

Today, as I process Ms. Tanneyhill’s papers, her dedication reminds me of how hard it can be to keep a family history intact. It also reminds me of the many, many families like mine who have lost so much of our past.

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Children’s Book Week: Classic Freebies

Children’s Book Week is 100 years old this year, and there are a lot of cool things to do and see at your favorite national library. Here, let’s check out a handful of insanely popular titles that kids were reading in 1919, when the very first book week was launched. This is particularly fun because all of these are FREE on our website.

A century ago, the population of the U.S. was less than a third of what it is now (106 million), large parts of the country were without electricity, indoor plumbing or even the illumination to read by. Not only did people still look up when they saw an airplane go overhead, virtually no one had seen an airplane go overhead. World War I had ended, but the Roaring Twenties hadn’t started. It would be nearly a decade before movies had sound. It was an era of long silences and quiet nights; when reading words printed on paper was still the dominant means of mass entertainment.

Ready?

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Let’s jump right in with some extraterrestrial adventure that starts in…Virginia. Well, of course. Where else would you start your interplanetary travel?

This is “A Princess of Mars,” the first adventure of John Carter, in which a southern gentleman escapes the depressing aftermath of the Civil War by heading for a gold mine in Arizona and winding up on Mars. It could happen to anyone.  Complications ensue.

Chicago native Edgar Rice Burroughs created Carter in a magazine serial in 1912, the same year he created Carter’s more famous counterpart, John Clayton, aka Tarzan. (Burroughs’ prodigious imagination did not seem to apply in picking names for his heroes.)  “Princess”  was published as a full novel in 1917, was a runaway success, and nine more books followed. If he wasn’t the Lord of the Apes, he was still kind of a big deal.

Burroughs opens the book, writing as himself, in the foreword. He makes the (fictional) claim that he was a boy of five, living in antebellum Virginia, when the dark, handsome Carter showed up at the family homestead, a great friend of his father’s. (It is a jolt when he casually says that his family owned slaves.) Carter is a manly man, a first-rate charmer. But then the war breaks out and nobody sees Uncle Jack for 15 years or so. When he returns, there is something curious about him — he does not appear to have aged.  Carter moves to a beautiful cabin on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River in New York. In 1886, he sends an urgent message to Burroughs, summoning him to come at once. But by the time Burroughs arrives, Carter is dead. The body was found in a snowy field, with no marks of violence, arms outstretched to the heavens.

Burroughs is to surprised to learn that he is to receive all of Carter’s wealth, provided he carry out one spectactularly peculiar final request: He must take Carter’s corpse back to Virginia and place it inside an open coffin in a pre-constructed, ventilated burial chamber. The mausoleum has a gold-plated spring lock that can only be opened … from the inside.

That’s the first few pages. Not bad, not at all. Then you get to go to Mars. And, as our illustration documents, Carter swashbuckles his way across the red planet with a kilt and a really big belt. Love.

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Long before Little Orphan Annie was everyone’s favorite 11-year-old red-headed orphan, everybody’s favorite 11-year-old red-headed orphan was the loquacious Canadian, Anne Shirley. She’s better known as “Anne of Green Gables,” she predates her comic counterpart by 16 years, and since Lucy Maud Montgomery’s brought her to fictional life in 1908, more than 50 million readers have gulped down her adventures in some three dozen languages.

There are no monsters or extraterrestrials and not even a princess in this one. It’s 1874, and Green Gables is a quiet little spot in a quiet little corner of Prince George’s Island, just off the coast of  the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In this sleepy stretch of farmland, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, an aging brother and sister, tend a farm. They have agreed to adopt a strapping boy from a Nova Scotia orphanage. He’ll get a new home; they’ll get a farmhand.

Except there’s a mistake in the orphanage shipping department, because it’s slender, bony Anne who gets off the train! Matthew is just fine with this. Marilla, though, wants to send Anne packing back to the orphange for a gender-based exchange.

Literary history is relieved that she didn’t, for its Anne who gives the Cuthberts new life, the little town of Avonlea a new spark and generations of readers a new friend. Two world wars have come and gone, airplanes and spaceships, cell phones and Netflix, and still Anne  has been there all these many years, waiting to play by the creek.

The final line — ” ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,’ whispered Anne softly” — reads more like a benediction as the years pass, a gentle ode to a quiet corner of the world, tucked in just so.

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Generally, when a woman loses a brand new shoe on her way out of a really hot party, as Cinderella does here, bad things happen. She is grumpy the entire way home, the good vibes vanish, and the remaining shoe is likely to be thrown, at the very least, at or in the closet.

Cue Prince Charming, Patron Saint of Lost Footwear. Everything turns out spiffy.

This is short, perfect for a bedtime story, and an excellent reminder that very little in life beats a fairy godmother with a keen sense of sartorial style.

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Wolves have a hard time of it in kid lit, let’s be honest.

From “Little Red Riding Hood” to “The Story of the Three Little Pigs,” the wolf is always sharp of tooth but not of mind. (Cross-dressing as a little old lady? Who does that?)

But you can’t have a selection of kids’ stories without a big bad wolf (or a dark forest), and, besides, “Pigs” is one of the all-time champs for adults who like to make ridiculous narrative voices while reading bedtime stories. There’s the basso profundo joy of  “Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll bbbbllllooooow your house in!” and the falsetto delight of “Not by the hair of my chinny chinny chin!”

This 1904 retelling, published by the Frederick Warne Co. with illustrations by Leslie Brooke, highlights the benefits of solid home construction and the perils of working with cheap contractors, messages as modern as anything you’ll hear on HGTV.

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Pic of the Week: Cherry Blossom Edition

Sometimes, for a moment or two, life is just about the depth of the colors in the world around us. And, as a writing professor always used to remind me, “Don’t forget to look up.” Shawn Miller, the Library’s photographer, always seems to keep that adage in mind. Here, looking up, is the dome of your favorite national library, framed by the cherry blossoms that make this time of year in D.C. special.

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

Crowdsourcing the Clara Barton Diaries? Let Miss Barton Come to Your Aid!

One of the Library’s crowdsourcing projects at By The People is “ Clara Barton: ‘Angel of the Battlefield,’ ” in which volunteers are transcribing the diaries of the legendary nurse.

  Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Library’s Manuscript Division, recently was working with Barton’s diaries, puzzling over a blurred name. For those of you drawn to such literary mysteries, and who might be intrigued to try your hand on the project, here’s a story of her detective work. Share your By the People stories with us, too!

I recently delved into Clara Barton’s diaries and stumbled across the kind of puzzle that makes my work so fascinating. My story might help you, as a kind of a how-to, in using the Library’s resources in your own research.

It began when I was looking into Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s biography, Clara Barton: Professional Angel. The task at hand was to determine if Pryor used Barton’s diaries to help document Barton’s work following the Sea Islands Hurricane of Aug. 27, 1893, which devastated South Carolina. Yes, it turned out: Pryor cited several dates, and quoted from Barton’s diary entry of October 1, 1893.

Here is that page, from Barton’s May 1893-May 1894 pocket diary. It is tiny, just 5.5 inches tall.

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On the project site, I noticed a volunteer had completed most of that Oct. 1 entry, and correctly added brackets for words that were illegible or speculative. Since several brackets overlapped the quotation supplied by Pryor in her book, I added the missing words to the transcription.

Then curiosity took hold. I looked at the other doubtful words. At least one was a name, which the original transcriber reasonably speculated was “Grace.”

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On the next page, though, in a sentence that reads, “Sent our telegram to…” the same name now looked more like “De G—-.”

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I was intrigued. I wanted to make that identification. But how could I find the name?

First, I turned to the Clara Barton Papers, available online through the Manuscript Division.  I looked in the General Correspondence series, which is arranged alphabetically by the name of the correspondent. Scanning the “D” names in the collection finding aid, I got a hit: “DeGraw, Peter V.”

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Ideally, for confirmation, in the “DeGraw, Peter V. and Emma” file, I would find a letter to Barton beginning, “I received your telegram of October 2….” That would have sealed the deal. Alas, this was a dead end. There was no such letter.

Still, I kept looking, and I discovered something nearly as good. Years earlier, in 1888, DeGraw had written a letter to Barton. On the back of it, Barton noted, “P. V. DeGraw,” in script that looked convincingly similar to her later diary entry.

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That was good, but not quite proof positive.

So, next, I went back to the Barton Papers. I consulted the Letterbook series, which contains copies of letters and memoranda, written by Barton and other Red Cross officials. It is arranged chronologically.

The June 1892-January 1894 volume was promising. An index at the front listed the page numbers of DeGraw correspondence, helping me hone in quickly. And there, on page 502, the mystery was solved. A copy of an Oct. 2, 1893 telegram sent by Barton to “P. V. DeGraw,” notified him that the Red Cross accepted responsibility for Sea Islands relief work.

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Telegram from Barton to P. V. DeGraw, October 2, 1893

The telegram includes Barton’s prediction that the work would involve meeting the needs of “thirty thousand people for eight long months with no aid from the Government,” which later accounts suggest was not far from the reality.

That was it. I had my mystery solved. I added in the name to the transcript, delighted.

I was not quite done, though. Barton’s own writings helped interpret another mysterious word in brackets… the final word on October 2:

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The transcriber recorded the last two words as “all [  ].” Could I solve that, too?

Barton, I knew, published books on her life and the work of the American Red Cross, so I again consulted the Barton Papers online. First, I went to the Related Resources page, and looked under the “selected Barton publications” list. The Sea Islands relief work comprises an entire chapter in “The Red Cross in Peace and War.” Reading that, I noticed that a passage on page 202 suggested a possible interpretation: “…the Beaufort Relief Commission, as appointed by the governor, was formally released as a committee and immediate re-elected by the Red Cross as its ‘advisory board’….”

Could “all [ ]” actually be “our board.” hurriedly written in a small pocket diary? I think so, but the reviewer of my addition to the transcription will be the judge.

So, to sum up: Through the efforts of previous transcribers, my consultations of the collection finding aid and the Barton Papers, plus Barton’s own writings, the diary entries for October 1-2, 1893, may now be complete.

This might seem like a considerable effort for a short text. But I hope that this example of using numerous parts of the Barton collection to solve its mysteries might help other transcribers understand the context in which Barton wrote about her relief work, and offer ideas about how to track down the people and groups who were part of her universe.

Plus, who are we kidding? The detective work is fun!

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Superheroes, Superteams

This is a guest post by Megan Halsband, a mild-mannered reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division, who may or may not have a superhero secret identity and a cape at the ready. Wonder Woman’s day job, film fans will recall, is an art historian in the Louvre. Megan, meanwhile, is an art historian who works at the world’s largest library. Hhmmmm. Here, she writes about superhero team building and one of Wonder Woman’s early appearances. Coincidences, all? We’ll never tell. 

 

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Avengers, no. 1 (1963).

Ahh, the superhero team – where would comics be without them? No Avengers, no Birds of Prey, no Watchmen, no Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (my favorite)! From the beginning superheroes, anti-heroes, and villains have joined forces to create some epic comic stories. And you can come and read them here at the Library of Congress in the Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room.

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Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, no. 1 (1984).

One of the earliest teams, the Justice Society of America, appeared in All Star,no. 3 (Winter 1940). While Doctor Fate and the Spectre (two of the original members) might not be as well-known now as some of their other team members (Flash and Green Lantern), the Justice Society of America has included major characters such as Wonder Woman and Black Canary over the years as well.

 

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All Star Comics, no. 3 (Winter 1940).

 

 

 

The Silver Age of comics introduced some of the most popular teams of today – the aforementioned Avengers – as well as the X-Men, the Justice League, Doom Patrol, and the Guardians of the Galaxy (to name a few).

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Marvel Super Heroes, no. 18 (January 1969).

 

 

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X-Men, no. 1 (September 1963).

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Justice League of America, no. 21 (August 1963).

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World’s Best Comics, no. 1 (1941).

And then there are the Team-Ups. Remember when Superman, Batman, and Robin teamed up in 1941 in World’s Best Comics (later World’s Finest Comics)? There was also that time when the Justice Society of America met the Justice League in August 1963. There were even entire series, like Marvel Team Up and Marvel Team Up Annual, devoted to team-ups. In this case usually Spiderman and someone else.

 

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The Ren and Stimpy Show, no. 6 (May 1993).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are so many others from Watchmen, Teen Titans, and Suicide Squad to Alpha Flight and Powerman and Iron Fist. And there were teams and team-ups that were downright curious – like the Forgotten Heroes in Action Comics, no. 545 (July 1983) or when Spiderman joined Ren & Stimpy.

Got a favorite team/team-up? Tell us in the comments!

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Inquiring Minds: Carolyn Bennett, Teacher-in-Residence

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Carolyn Bennett. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Carolyn Bennett teaches music at Wheeler Middle/High School in North Stonington, Connecticut. This year, however, she’s taking a break from the classroom — with the goal of adding to her instructional repertoire.

She is working with the Library’s Learning and Innovation Office as a teacher-in-residence, researching online resources at the Library that she and other teachers across the country can incorporate into the classroom. At the same time, she is contributing to a National Association of Music Education (NAFME) curriculum-development project that draws on digitized materials at the Library.

Here, Bennett answers a few questions about her experience at the Library.

Tell us a little about your teaching.

I teach students in grades 6 to 12, specializing in chorus, piano, guitar, theory and general music. My goal is to equip my students to be self-sufficient, musical people for the rest of their lives through listening perceptively, performing effectively and composing creatively. Pursuing these musical skills builds so many qualities that allow us to live full, human lives: cooperation, determination, innovation, confidence.

What inspired you to apply for residency at the Library?

Much of the repertoire I present to my students — folk songs from around the world, spirituals, pieces built on the 12-bar blues progression — is powerfully tied to the identity, history and viewpoint of its creators. Students need resources to make the context for these pieces come alive. Often, searching for resources would lead me to primary sources at the Library. I was intrigued by the opportunity to spend a year immersing myself and sharing my discoveries with music-educator colleagues.

Which collection items stand out to you so far?

Lowell Mason was an early proponent of music’s place in public education. In 1837, he became America’s first public-school music teacher. He jointly compiled “The Boston Glee Book,” a choral anthology for schools, which the Library holds. Many of the pieces charmingly address concepts that are still relevant in today’s music classroom. I can’t wait to perform “Come Sing This Round with Me” with my choir next year. By singing pieces from this anthology, students can directly participate in a historically American value: the belief that education, including arts education, is an important gift we freely give to the next generation.

In 1940, Irene Williams met with Ruby and John Lomax to describe her early years in slavery. In an audio recording in the collections, she recalls church services and sings a beautiful rendition of “Keep Your Lamp a Trimmed and Burning.” This is a piece my middle-school choirs have performed several times over the years. How powerful for them to hear it directly from a woman who survived slavery!

I have shared other gems through posts on the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog.

What is your involvement in the NAFME curriculum-development project?

Supported by a grant from the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources program, the National Association for Music Education has been developing lesson units that introduce students to primary-source materials from the Library. Published units run the gamut: from enabling advanced high-school orchestras to contextualize Aaron Copland to inviting second-graders to explore creative movement with the Victor Orchestra on the National Jukebox. The lessons align with national core arts standards and are available online.

This year, my project team has focused on composition: How can the Library’s primary sources inspire students to think more creatively? Students in pilot tests are analyzing unconventional nursery rhymes from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division; they are investigating the contexts that gave rise to various work songs; and they are writing original soundtracks to Edison films. I’m eager to hear the students’ final compositions and also to witness how primary sources can deepen the ways students think about music.

How would you describe the value of the Library’s collections for teachers?

A group of 3-year-olds recently visited the Young Readers Center, and I was invited to sing “Sally Go Round the Sun” with them. In 1934, 19-year-old Alan Lomax, traveling with his father, had heard eight girls singing the song and insisted they record. This impulse to curate and preserve would stay with Lomax his whole life, later leading astronomer Carl Sagan to invite him to work on the Golden Record project in which phonograph recordings were launched aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977.

Of course, I didn’t share this story with the 3-year-olds, but it was my personal fascination:  Lomax’s musical imagination, captured by going “round the sun” in 1934, led to him compiling the first album to exit the solar system decades later.

The group and I had a grand time learning the song and trying out the movements described by several sources in the Library’s collections. Afterward, one older chaperone shared that she had sung this song in her own childhood. She had completely forgotten it until she heard the music and saw the children play. The music led her to rediscover a part of herself that she could now share with her young students.

To me, this shows the value of the Library’s collections: They connect us to other places, other times and, most importantly, other people. Teachers can use the Library’s treasures to bring the voices of the past into the minds of the future.

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My Job: Raymond White

One of the treats of the Library is having Raymond White show you the handwritten, working lyrics of “Do-Re-Mi” from “The Sound of Music,” with words crossed out and added in…and then sing them, showing you how Rodgers and Hammerstein developed the song into the international sensation it became. We asked him about the rest of his job in the March/April edition of the Library of Congress Magazine.

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Photo by Shawn Miller

How would you describe your work at the Library?

Fascinating. And varied. Some days, it’s acquisitions — the papers of jazz great Billy Strayhorn, or a collection of long-lost manuscripts of composer Samuel Barber, or holograph scores of Beethoven or Brahms or Franz Liszt or Felix Mendelssohn or Richard Wagner. Other days, it’s exhibitions — preparing materials for loan to other institutions or for exhibit here at the Library. And displays for Music Division concerts and lectures and for Madison Council meetings. And from time to time tours, research orientations and assisting distinguished music scholars and performers in their research. Writing a press release, a blog post, a condolence letter. Variety is a constant, and it’s part of what makes my job endlessly interesting.

How did you prepare for your position?

I began as a childhood musician, taking piano lessons and singing in a children’s choir. I came to the Library with degrees in music and in history and a plan to pursue graduate work in museum studies. After a short time, however, the opportunity to work with the music collections hooked me, and, as the saying goes, I have never looked back. In 1986, I became the first student to complete the then-new music librarianship dual degree program at Catholic University, and I subsequently did additional graduate study in music at the University of Maryland.

What have been some of your most memorable experiences at the Library?

Some have involved the surprises that sometimes accompany acquisitions. Seeing for the first time the lead sheet for the original version of “God Bless America” — which was not known to have survived. Holding in my hands for the first time the holograph manuscript of Rachmaninoff’s two-piano version of his Symphonic Dances. Reading for the first time the previously-unknown letters from George Gershwin to his psychoanalyst. And then there are events which are just by their nature memorable: I have participated in displays of materials for many notable visitors, including French President Macron and Gershwin Prize recipients Smokey Robinson and Paul McCartney, for whom I sang an unused lyric from Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business”!

Why are the Library’s Gershwin collections important and what are some of your favorite pieces from it?

Those collections are important because of the combination of two factors: the significance of composer George and lyricist Ira coupled with the richness and vastness of the Library’s Gershwin holdings. The Gershwin Collections support research into George and Ira’s careers as well as their lives — what they did, what they thought and who they knew. Among my favorite items from the collection are two letters dating from September 1936, shortly after the Gershwins had traveled to California to write for the silver screen. On Sept. 18, George wrote to his New York secretary: “We are giving a big party Saturday night for [playwright] Moss Hart’s new teeth, he having had all sorts of things done to his teeth with porcelain. We expect about seventy-five people.” And four days later, George reported to a friend, “We had about a hundred of the Hollywood notables all together in our house in honor of the unveiling of Moss Hart’s new teeth. The party lasted until after six in the morning and a good time was apparently had by all.”

Pic of the Week: Zimbabwe Edition

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Mokoomba performs during a Homegrown Concert Series event, April 15, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller

Mokoomba is a six-piece, multilingual Afro-Fusion band from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. In the midst of their 2019 North American tour, they popped into the Library for a dreads-swinging lunchtime set at the Coolidge Auditorium. It was part of the American Folklife Center’s Homegrown concert series, and it was (probably) more fun than any lunch you had this week.

Revealing Rare Rivera

This piece from John Hessler details the analytical work being done on paintings by the great Diego Rivera that are held by the Library. It was published in the Library of Congress Magazine’s March/April issue.Diego Rivera was by all measures one of the most important Mexican artists of the 20th century — his large-scale murals in San Francisco, Mexico City, New York and Detroit helped transform the style of public art and brought new ideas from the Parisian avant-garde to the Americas.

In the early 1930s, American writer and art critic John Weatherwax approached Rivera about illustrating an English translation of “Popol Vuh,” the Maya creation myth. Long fascinated by ancient indigenous cultures of Mexico and Mesoamerica, Rivera agreed. He produced a series of watercolors and gouache paintings to illustrate the text — paintings that in part derive their layouts, color palettes and themes from early Mesoamerican books or codices.

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Tana Villafana and John Hessler conduct testing on a historic painting by artist Diego Rivera in the Preservation Research and Testing Division, September 10, 2018. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Weatherwax’s translation was never published. But, today, the Library holds three of the watercolors — largely unknown to art historians and the public — in its Jay I. Kislak Collection. A team of Library curators and scientists recently used advanced imaging and analysis techniques to examine the underdrawings, paints and pigments — an effort to better understand the works for art historical purposes and to inform their conservation.

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The team digitally photographed the paintings at multiple wavelengths spanning the ultraviolet through the visible and into the near-infrared, a technique known as hyperspectral imaging. In this process, discrete components of an object — inks, glues, parchment — respond in unique ways to the different wavelengths.

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To get a more precise sense of the paints and pigments Rivera used, they employed fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy, which uses a white light source and a spectrometer to measure the amount and the color of light reflected from an object. And to analyze chemicals and elements in the paintings, they used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a process that nondestructively bombards the paintings with high-energy X-rays in precisely defined locations, inducing elements in the pigments to emit secondary X-rays that can be captured and analyzed.

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Meghan Wilson conducts analysis on a historic painting by artist Diego Rivera in the Preservation Research and Testing Division, September 10, 2018. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Preliminary results — to the team’s surprise — show the artist used very different pigment and paint palettes. For curators and scientists, the project makes clear the new knowledge that can be gained when they collaborate to better understand the collections — and that the sciences and the arts are full of hidden surprises.