Photochroms, published primarily from the 1890s to 1910s, are prints that were created by the Photoglob Company in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Detroit Publishing Company in Michigan. The richly colored images look like photographs but are actually ink-based photolithographs, usually 6.5 x 9 inches. You can learn more about them here.

The Library is looking toward the power of crowd-sourcing to help enhance our records about these images:

“Your addition of current place names is much appreciated! Some locations have changed names or even countries since 1900. And, the titles we had to work with from the photochrom publishers based in Detroit and Zurich tended to be English or German versions of the place names.”

(The included image, “Native girls, Marken Island, Holland,” from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog and also online at Flickr.)

A few weeks ago the head of our Music Division called to inform me that the third recipient of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song would be Sir Paul McCartney.  I’m fairly certain that they heard my reaction in the office next door.

This was not an easy thing for me to keep under wraps as we put the pieces in place for our announcement.  Paul McCartney is only my favorite musician of all time.  (It took a while, but eventually he surpassed Mozart.)

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, who made the selection, said, “It is hard to think of another performer and composer who has had a more indelible and transformative effect on popular song and music of several different genres than Paul McCartney.”

Or put more succinctly by The Washington Post, “Macca rules!” (external link)

McCartney joins music legends Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder as fellow honorees.

The Gershwin Prize “celebrates the work of an artist whose career reflects lifetime achievement in promoting song as a vehicle of musical expression and cultural understanding.”  You can read more about it here.

The Prize will be bestowed next spring, and keep your eye out for an all-star tribute concert thereafter on broadcast television.

The Library’s Science, Technology and Business Division is an excellent addition to our growing social-media family.  The very name of the division should tell you that it is chock full of wonderful stories and discoveries.  (Not incidentally, they also have some of the most amazing curators and reference specialists around.)  I myself have cribbed from their Everyday Mysteries website for blog fodder.

Jennifer Harbster and Donna Scanlon will be guiding you through the wonders of their corner of the Library.  Both of them have already been contributing guest posts to this blog.  They’re calling the new blog “Inside Adams.”  I’ll let them explain their moniker.

“Inside Adams” represents another step forward in bringing our stories and collections to you in new ways, but it also comes along with some work behind the scenes that can now usher in additional blogs.  We now have an aggregation page that features our blogs in a single place, along with recent posts, most-commented posts, and a handy list of our social media sites.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

And congratulations to Jennifer, Donna, and everyone else at ST&B.  “It’s a blog!”

I guess I should not have been surprised that this 87-year-old man was every bit as funny and incisive as he always has been.  He spun terrific yarns, was always quick with a quip, and he did it all without a single notecard.  The crowd was in stitches almost the entire time.  I saw people literally doubling over–you don’t see that too often.

The webcast of his talk, which included a lot of comments about the books he has written, is now online.

My favorite parts were the Shakespearean soliloquies that he recited verbatim, from memory.  What did you like most?

The “Books and Beyond” series in the Center for the Book launched a Facebook page, which is essentially an online book club, with the recent National Book Festival. (external link)  And now the Law Library of Congress has launched a feed on Twitter (external link).

The purpose of the Twitter feed, according to the Law Library, is “to engage Members of Congress, their staff, other law libraries, students, professors, librarians, and researchers.  … It will also serve as a venue for feedback on our material.”

Stay tuned for more social media-related announcements in coming days.

Some years ago, a monk decked in an elegant black robe visited the Recorded Sound Reading Room in search of the music of his elders: Coptic Chant, which comes out of an Orthodox Christian tradition in the Middle East. Who knows how far he had travelled to revisit this ancient music? But today, this monk or anyone else can listen to these sacred airs from a secluded monastery, or from their laptop at the corner café. A wealth of Coptic material is housed at the Library of Congress, and the Music Division is proud to be making it available for scholars and virtual travelers in Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant & Hymnody, The Ragheb Moftah Collection at the Library of Congress.

The word Coptic comes from the ancient Egyptian ha-ka-ptah, meaning “house of Ptah’s spirit.” Ptah was the god of Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt. But as Coptic scholar Carolyn Ramzy notes, “the blues did sound just a little different during the Pharaonic age.” How fitting that this venerable musical tradition should share a name with a city that became the wellspring of a very different American musical heritage. Ramzy worked with the Performing Arts Encyclopedia team and made some surprising discoveries in the Library’s collections, including a Coptic music transcription dating back to 1643, and 17th-century maps of Coptic Christian sites.

The Coptic community has fascinated explorers, missionaries and scholars for centuries. Besides the many extant historical artifacts, Coptic liturgical chant was, and still is, regarded as the last living testament of an Ancient Egyptian art.

(Image of Coptic cathedral from the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.)

What will happen next??  Find out in chapter 3, by Kate DiCamillo, on Oct. 23.  And don’t forget our new social media sharing tool, so that you can easily alert friends on your social network of choice.

It’s catching on even halfway around the world!

By the way, if you took any photos of the NBF and put them on Flickr, you might want to consider using the tag 2009nbf to help everyone get a fuller picture of the day’s festivities.  As I said on Saturday, the ground might have been dampened, but not people’s spirits.

Despite the weather, the 2009 National Book Festival still mustered up record attendance of 130,000, likely because of the prominence and star power of this year’s authors.

I hope to post a good selection of photos later today.