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.)

But sometimes, more is more, as Walt Disney found out after he created Mickey Mouse  in the late 1920s and had trouble finding a home for Mickey’s first two cartoons (“Plane Crazy” and “The Gallopin’ Gaucho”), which were silent, before scoring a solid hit with the musical talkie “Steamboat Willie.” 

“You can run any of these pictures and they’d be dragging and boring, but the minute you put music behind then, they have life and vitality they don’t get in any other way,” Disney once said.

The Library of Congress today opens “Molto Animato!” an exhibition celebrating the winning combo of animation and music, in its Music Division Performing Arts Reading Room in the James Madison Building (101 Independence Ave., S.E., Room LM113, Washington, D.C.) The exhibition will be on view through next March 28 and will be open from 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Featured items include a pen-and-ink brush drawing of conductor Leopold Stokowski by caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias; the score from “Bambi,” with music by Frank Churchill and Edward Plumb and lyrics by Larry Morey; John Alden Carpenter’s manuscript piano score for “Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime”; and the movie poster for “Walt Disney Pictures Presents Aladdin.”

Also on view will be items from the Library’s Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature, the David Raksin Collection of film scores (You can view excerpts, including the cartoons, from his scores for “Giddyap” and “The Unicorn in the Garden”) and the Howard Ashman Collection, including the draft script of Disney’s animated film “The Little Mermaid” and audio of Howard Ashman singing Disney movie songs of his own composing.

Let’s face it: sometimes silence is golden, but “Fantasia” wouldn’t have been nearly as fantastic without the power of music.  Here’s Mickey, in “Fantasia,” dressed to enact “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a symphonic poem by composer Paul Dukas.

Generations of former kids who learned their ABCs on PBS will be celebrating today’s 40^th anniversary of the show “Sesame Street.”  (external link)

The Library’s been a fan right along! In April 2000, for example, when the Library of Congress celebrated its bicentennial, Big Bird was named a Living Legend by the Librarian of Congress.

In 2006, Elmo was our guest at the National Book Festival, along with his animator, Kevin Clash.  Elmo was also invited to the White House then.

And “Maria” (Sonia Manzano) appeared at the National Book Festival in 2004.

Of course, the many books, films and music that have come out of the hit series can be found in the Library’s collections.

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!”

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.)

Maybe the Irish tell better ghost stories: “Dooligan’s Ghost” (by Karst and Gibson, 1892) tells the cautionary tale of a man who emerged from the death-slab at his own wake, simply because he couldn’t stand to see his friends get drunk without him.  In another fin-de-siecle Irish ghost story, “The Haunted Spring” is visited by the specter of  “an enchanted lady [who] assumes the shape of a White Doe and lures hunters to Fairy Land.” Similarly, “The Haunted Stream,” in an unspecified far-away forest, is where a woman lures a “witless knight” to her underwater lair, “lined with gold.” Naturally.

Another spectral visitor was visited upon us in 1888 by the song-writing team of Arno Bley and the aptly named Edmund Mortimer. “The Dead Actress” “came’st in thy loveliness before us at night!” There is unlikely to be a 3-D movie in the works, but you never know.

Rounding out your dance card are piano arrangements for “Ghost’s Gallop” and “Goblin Galop.”  In a less scary vein, those kids who go out trick-or-treating as firefighters might vary the theme and dress up as “My Ragtime Fireman.”

(Thanks to Patricio Padua of the Library’s Collections and Services Division for this post!)

While the baseball season winds down and the excitement of another World Series chase begins, we’re celebrating the national pastime with a new book, Baseball Americana: Treasures from the Library of Congress (drawing rave reviews in places like Sports Illustrated) and a two-day symposium on baseball at the Library October 2-3, 2009.

Long before TV and the Internet provided coverage of every game and at-bat, Americans saw images of their favorite teams and players in books, newspapers  and magazines.  They saw them on tobacco and candy packages, on sheet-music covers  and in the movies.  People were playing baseball everywhere, and we found baseball everywhere in our rich visual collections.

Images and artifacts from the game are as old as our country and mark its heritage and history–in a children’s book published in Worcester, Massachusetts the same year that that U.S. Constitution was written, in a depiction of Civil War prisoners actively playing in a North Carolina camp, in baseball cards showing the first heroes and stars of the game, in the first Negro League World Series in Kansas City in 1924, in the games we’ve played ourselves in sandlots and fields around the country.

As a member of the Library’s Flickr pilot team, I’ve enjoyed watching that community discover and enjoy baseball pictures they’d never seen before.  To make selections for the book, my co-authors and I also had fun poring through thousands of images to find even more rare surprises. Why is Babe Ruth lying unconscious on the field? It’s not what you might think.  We put the Babe and a sampling of 22 other photographs from the book into this week’s new Flickr set.  Enjoy!

To see more historic baseball resources at the Library, visit the America’s Pastime page and a resources page here.  You can also purchase the Baseball Americana book and other baseball-related items in the Library’s online shop.

Our folks have been busily working behind the scenes on a revamp of our literacy.gov website, which promotes lifelong literacy and related programs at the Library.  The result, which we have launched to coincide with the Book Festival, is called read.gov, and not to be immodest, but it’s pretty dang fantastic.

Some of the new features include a huge array of classic books that can be read in their entirety with a nifty page-turning technology (I’m in the middle of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz“), author webcasts, writing contests promoted by our Center for the Book (CFB), and even a link to a new online book club that we have begun on Facebook, based on CFB’s Books and Beyond series.  It works like this: Folks can read the books featured in the series and watch the webcasts of the respective authors, and then go online to discuss.  (Paging Oprah … )  Oh, and I almost forgot: Every single page, book or feature of the site is sharable to a dozen of the most popular social-networking sites, a feature you’ll begin to see more and more on our websites.

But what is almost indisputably the coolest thing of all, and which has had many of us around here giddy with excitement, is the curiously named “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure.”  Actually, the full title is “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure: A Very Unusual and Completely Amazing Story Pieced Together Out of So Many Parts That It Is Not Possible To Describe Them All Here So Go Ahead and Just Start Reading.”

In the process, many of us learned that an “exquisite corpse” is an old parlor game in which people would write a phrase on a piece of paper, fold it over, and then the next person would continue writing from there, and so on, until a whole sentence was completed.  Our “Exquisite Corpse” debuts in at least two senses of the term (and don’t worry, the literal one is family-friendly).

Famed authors of books for young people will contribute 26 successive chapters, which will be released every two weeks on read.gov, with the final chapter coinciding with the 2010 National Book Festival.  (The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance has been a tremendous partner in this project, and the Ad Council has been an enormous help with the overall read.gov site.)

The first chapter was penned by none other than our National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Jon Scieszka.  It is zany, it is funny (I literally LOL’d several times reading it), and it makes you want to know just where the heck the story can possibly go from there.  I’ve had the pleasure of reading a few more chapters in advance (no spoilers), and so far, it’s a terrific ride.

I wanted to end with a testimonial that I received from Chris of our web development team.  (In many ways, this was his baby.)  Granted, he’s biased, but his kids aren’t:

Tonight I had one of the most memorable and rewarding experiences of my professional career.

Audrey asked me to put the boys to bed (as I had been dragging around the house all day with this cold, and watching her do everything).  Of course, before bedtime, we always read.

I told the boys to lie in our bed and that I had a surprise for them.  I got Audrey’s laptop and went to read.gov.  I sat between Jonah (age 7) and Sam (age 4) and I read the introduction (about content) of the Exquisite Corpse.  I then asked them if I should read it to them.  They were somewhat interested.

Then I launched the book viewer   Both of them perked up.  I began to read and both listened intently.  As I reached the end of the first page I asked Sam to push the button.  He did and the page turned.  They both oohed and awwed, but more importantly, they wanted me to read what was next.  They giggled in anticipation as I read this part of the story:

“If the train makes it over the last treacherous gorge, there is a good chance that you and Nancy and Joe will have to deal with werewolves and mad scientists, real ninjas and fake vampires, one roller-skating baby, a talking pig, creatures from another planet (possibly another dimension), killer poetry, clues from classic children’s books, two easy riddles, several bad knock knock jokes, plenty of explosions, a monkey disguised as a pirate, two meatballs, a blue plastic Star Wars lunch box (missing its matching thermos), three ticking clocks, and not just one bad guy – but a whole army of villains, cads, scalawags, sneaks, rats, varmints and swindlers. Also several desperados, a gang of evildoers, and one just plain bad egg.”

When we reached “To be continued”, Jonah tried to push the button to turn the page.  I told him that we would have to wait two weeks and then the book would magically add pages.   I then told them that Daddy had a team of people at work who created the story and the software.  I think at that moment he thought I was the coolest dad in the world.  He then asked,”Dad, if you are working on this, can’t the new chapters come out every week instead of every two weeks?”

Both boys loved the illustration and asked to see more. They kept making me go back so that they could look at the dynamite.

I told them that I would bring them a poster to hang in their rooms and huge smiles illuminated their faces.

Yes, we will indeed have Exquisite Corpse posters to give away tomorrow at the Library of Congress Pavilion, so get ‘em while they last.  They’re terrific, reminiscent of the cover of a well-worn pulp novel, and using the first illustration from the story as inspiration (see nearby image).

It truly doesn’t matter how old you are: I think you’ll really enjoy “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure”!  And I’ve added it to the long list of reasons why I work at the coolest place in the universe.

It can be thrilling — at an airshow, for example.

It can also be reassuring — the way it was, for many, in the early morning hours over the Washington, D.C. area for months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Library of Congress has acquired a series of 60 spectacular photographs taken by master photographer Nicholas A. Price on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the United States Air Force.  This collection of large-format black-and-white prints, from a National Museum of the U.S. Air Force exhibition titled “Cleared Hot! An Exclusive and Personal Photographic Journey into the U. S. Air Force” will be available to researchers in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division.

The phrase “cleared hot” is an Air Force go-ahead to engage a target, or complete an action or mission.

Price took more than 8,000 photographs between 2005 and 2007 at two Air Force bases in Nevada — Creech in Indian Springs and Nellis in North Las Vegas.  He said he wanted to show the human face of the modern Air Force, particularly its diversity and its “unsung heroes, the men and women who do what no one hears about” such as securing the base, providing ground-combat forces, bringing new technologies to bear or caring for military folk and their equipment.

“The 60 photographs create a valuable visual story for understanding the hard work and deep commitment of today’s military,” said Helena Zinkham, acting chief of the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. “This compelling photographic essay, created to honor the men and women of the Air Force, enriches the Library’s collections by providing a contemporary counterpart to our historic resources.”