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.

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!

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.

Sprawled on the lawn, curled up on the sofa, sitting on the steps in the piazza — they’re communing with a great author, or a funny author, or an author who’s telling them how to cook or knit or fix something in their life that’s broken. Some of them are reading poetry.  Some of them are reading it on e-book devices.

There are millions of them, all scattered around.  One book to a person, one person to a book.

Saturday, more than 120,000 of them are projected to be on one lawn, in one city, at one time: on the National Mall at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.  It’ll happen from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., rain or shine — free of charge.

YES.

More than 70 major authors will speak about their writing before happy crowds in pavilions dedicated to Fiction & Fantasy, History & Biography, Mysteries & Thrillers, Children, Teens & Children, and Poetry & Prose. The authors will also sign books for their fans.

Families can enjoy the literacy-promotion activities of the state and territorial Centers for the Book in the Pavilion of the States; kids can enjoy activities and presentations planned just for them in the “Let’s Read America” pavilions. The “Digital Bookmobile” will be there.  The Library of Congress will showcase its Library of Congress Experience and social-networking activities, including this blog , its Flickr page and its Facebook page. The whole thing will be on Twitter (@librarycongress, hashtag #nbf).  Also, our website for the book festival is a great place to plan for this feast, complete with fresh podcasts from more than a dozen of this year’s authors. There’s a Young Readers’ Toolkit there, too. And the day of the book festival, webcasts of many of the author presentations will be available on the festival website.

Here’s a tip — this “Lollapalooza” of the book world is going to open with a flourish. A team of young people’s authors, fronted by the irrepressible National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jon Scieszka, will launch the new read.gov website that promotes reading and literacy for all ages as the festival opens at 10 a.m., in the Children’s pavilion.  You won’t have to be a kid to get a kick out of this one: The new site will premiere a serial story, with the first (completely zany) chapter to be read by Scieszka from the stage.  It’s titled “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure,” and to find out what happens next — this story will unfold every two weeks for a year — you’ll have to go to read.gov.

But to find out what the coolest event is in Washington D.C. is on September 26, 2009, you’ll have to go to the National Mall between 7th and 14th streets.  Wear comfortable shoes — and prepare to be swept away!

These days, here on Capitol Hill, you can give Thomas Jefferson a jab … and dig a little deeper into his mind.

It’s possible because of a set of exhibitions featuring touch-screen interactive stations, all in the Library’s graceful and ornate Thomas Jefferson Building. These exhibits collectively are known as “The Library of Congress Experience.” This offering, available to you for a little over a year now, is winning awards all over the place, and if you visit the Library at First St. S.E. and Independence Avenue and check it out, you’ll find out why.

The Library of Congress Experience places touch-screen stations throughout three exhibitions: Creating the United States, which delves into the collaborative process that led to the major founding documents of our nation; Thomas Jefferson’s Library, featuring more than 6,000 books once in our third president’s personal library that he made available to replace the congressional library torched by the British in the War of 1812; and Exploring the Early Americas, which showcases the amazing pre-Columbian art collection of Library patron Jay Kislak.

There are also touch-screen stations showing off the art and architecture of the breathtaking Thomas Jefferson Building interior and explaining the rarity and relative importance of the Library’s Gutenberg Bible and its Giant Bible of Mainz.

Even better, if you pick up a “Passport to Knowledge” at the orientation desks as you enter the building, you can take just a moment to link your passport to a personalized online account and use the barcode on the passport to “collect” your favorite items in these exhibitions — sending a digitized version of the item to your personal web page.

Won’t be in town to pick up that passport? You can create a personalized web page from home.

About those awards: the latest comes from the GovMark Council, which awarded “Best Overall Marketing Program” to the Experience. There have been about a dozen previous awards, including Best in Show from the HOW Interactive Design Awards, Best in Show and Deployer of the Year from KioskCom, and a Silver Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America for Excellence in Integrated Communication.

Such as?

Such as an ad for a patent medicine that figured in an 1898 murder case; a first edition in Russian of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed;” small Brazilian books of populist poetry in Portuguese commemorating everything from the regional Robin Hood (Pernoite de Lampiao) to the felling of the World Trade Center towers; and the small-but-astonishing notebooks of artist and designer James Miho (who dropped in to see the display).

Today was results day for the fifth class of Library of Congress Junior Fellows, who showed off fascinating materials turned up in their work researching, inventorying, and cataloging these collections to make them easier to use. The internships are made possible by the generosity of the late Mrs. Jefferson Patterson and the Library’s James Madison Council.

Leslie Tabor, a second-year master’s candidate in Library Information Science at Syracuse University who worked with materials found in the Copyright Office, described how Kutnow’s Effervescent Powder figured in a murder case. A killer laced the nostrum with poison; today’s display featured a newspaper ad for the medicine–that offered free samples!

Jacob Roberts, who’ll be a junior majoring in History at Wesleyan University in the fall, used the Library’s “Chronicling America” collection of U.S. newspapers to research U.S. angles on the Dreyfus Affair, an infamous French anti-Semitism case that drew the famous phrase “J’Accuse!” from writer and journalist Emile Zola.

Shireen Al-Zahawi of Salt Lake City, who graduated last year with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Utah, researched the life of Library of Congress Japanese specialist Shiho Sakanishi, who died in 1976. The Japanese-born Sakanishi, a translator and scholar, attended college in the U.S., taught for a time, then became a specialist in the Library’s Japanese-language collections from 1930-1941. With the declaration of war against Japan in World War II, however, she was first interned and later deported to the nation of her birth. There, Dr. Sakanishi was honored for her scholarship. She returned to the U.S. in 1963 to give a convocation address at her alma mater, the University of Michigan.

Lest you think all these newly-exposed nuggets are still yellow with age, consider this: that collection of Brazilian folk poetry (”literatura de cordel”) continues to grow. Fellow Amy Jankowski, a master’s candidate in Library Science at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, noted that one of the freshest items in it is an ode to pop singer Michael Jackson … written, and placed in the collections, since his death.

You nation’s Library has millions of stories to tell, so we’re trying to tell them as many places and to as many people as possible–whether on our own website or elsewhere.  And now you can add another biggie to the list: iTunes U.

For those who don’t know, iTunes U is an area of the iTunes Store offering free education audio and video content from many of the world’s top universities and other institutions. (The iTunes application is needed to access iTunes U, and is a free download from www.apple.com/itunes.)

The Library’s iTunes U page launched today with a great deal of content, with much more to come.  (Link here, opens in iTunes.)  A nice bonus, for those in the know, is that the content is downloadable and even includes materials such as PDFs.

As always, it’s also available in the Library’s own corner of the web.

So as long as people keep finding new ways to get information, we’re going to keep finding ways to get it to you!

As the materials expanded, so to did their educational potential and the realization that students’ exposure to these resources can ignite a desire to learn, along with critical-thinking skills, in the context of high-quality, inquiry-based instruction.  Thus was born the congressionally mandated Teaching With Primary Sources (TPS) program in 2005 and a full-time Educational Outreach office at the Library.

The Library’s K-12 mission has now taken another step forward: a web portal bringing together its resources for teacher in a single place at loc.gov/teachers.  It’s a new, easy-to-find center just one click away from the Library’s homepage.

An important feature of the free online site is a new build-it-yourself professional-development tool for teachers called TPS Direct.  TPS Direct will offers any educator, at any time, the ability to customize professional-development activities for use at the school, district or state level for delivery in a face-to-face, online or blended format.

TPS Direct is being formally rolled out tomorrow at a special gathering of attendees of the National Educational Computing Conference in Washington, D.C., a program of the International Society for Technology in Education.

Other features of loc.gov/teachers include:

• A dedicated home page for primary source sets.
• “Using Primary Sources,” a quick introduction to the authentic classroom use of primary sources.
• And coming soon, a new search tool just for classroom materials.

The full transition of educational materials to the site will take place over time, and new features will become available from now on, so keep watching for the latest developments. If you’re having trouble finding a familiar resource, ask our reference staff using the “contact” link at the bottom of every Library Web page.

Whether you’re a longtime user or just beginning, we hope you’ll explore the new site, update your bookmarks, and discover the instructional power of primary sources at loc.gov/teachers.

2009 marks the 14th year the program, co-founded by former U. S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass and writer Pamela Michael and affiliated with the Library’s Center for the Book, has reached out to young people in the United States and Canada and indeed, around the world. The program urges them to express their relationship with or concerns about the natural world in the form of poetry or visual art. Hass said there were 20,000 entries this year.

Here’s an excerpt from the grand prize-winning poem in Category II (grades 3-6), “It’s a Letter” by 9-year-old Yalonda Lockett of Lancaster, Pennsylvania:

In the dark blue sea

I saw a letter, it was

very small and this

is what it said:

I miss you in the dark blue sea.

Finalist Ruben Moreno, 10, of Silver Spring, Maryland wrote about the pond behind his home:

… a lover of rain and fresh melting snow.

She fears the sun — a slow hot demise,

And thirsts for water — a random revival.

A sliver of calm tucked

Into new urban sprawl …

To read the poems and see the artwork of these talented young students, ranging in age from 5 to 19, see the River of Words website.

Then go outside!