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!”

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.

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.

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.

1. Attend!  It’s tomorrow (Sept. 26) from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EDT on the National Mall (between 7th and 14th), rain or shine.  If it’s the former, don’t worry!  We have huge tents for the author pavilions, many of which are even bigger than they have been in previous years.

2.Visit the National Book Festival website and get all the 411 you need.

3. Check the schedule of author pavilion presentations and book signings, along with the site map (PDF link), and make your battle plan ahead of time.

4. Visit our new NBF website that’s optimized for mobile devices, both before you come and on the grounds.  Just type in www.loc.gov/bookfest and it will automatically show you the mobile-ready version.

5. Sign up by tomorrow to receive text alerts.  Just send BOOK to 61399.

6. Listen to our podcast interviews with 2009 NBF authors, and archives from previous years.  (Also available on iTunes.)

7. Watch webcasts of every single author presentation at the National Book Festival.  This year’s webcasts will begin to be posted by mid- to late-afternoon tomorrow.  Archives from previous years are also available, with many also on iTunes U and YouTube.

8. Follow the action on Twitter (@librarycongress).  Use the hashtag #nbf to see what we and everyone else are saying.  All tweets with the #nbf hashtag will be shown in real time on large monitors in the Library of Congress Pavilion.

9. If you’re in D.C. tomorrow and are on Twitter, come be a part of our first-ever “Tweet-Up” at 3:30 p.m. at the Library of Congress Pavilion.  (PDF site map here.)  I’ll be there talking about the Book Festival and some of the things we’re doing with social media, and hopefully scores of fingers will be madly tweeting away.

10. Become a fan of us on Facebook, either the Library’s main page or the new Books and Beyond page, where we’re marking the 2009 NBF by starting a virtual book club.

11. Watch C-SPAN’s coverage tomorrow.  Starting at about 9 a.m. EDT, they will show the authors program from the NBF gala reception.  Slated to speak are David Baldacci, Judy Blume, John Grisham, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Julia Alvarez.  Then at around 10 a.m., they will broadcast live all day from the festival.

12. Check out the NBF website at washingtonpost.com.  Among the highlights are transcripts of three online author chats.

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.

Included in the first round are Junot Diaz, Rickey Minor, James Patterson, George Pelecanos, Nicholas Sparks and David Wroblewski–with more to come.  And they’re all free for the listening!

You can read more about the National Book Festival here, and don’t forget to follow us on on Facebook and on Twitter (@librarycongress), which explains the hashtag at the beginning of this post.  (Digression: Is it a coincidence that hashtags appear to make a hash of the English language?)

In a first for the Library, you can also sign up to receive text/SMS message alerts by texting BOOK to 61399.  (Standard messaging rates apply)

We’ve started with a pretty basic set of tabs and features, such as a wall for Library and fans alike, but we will continue to “build out,” so to speak.  We have at least a couple of hopefully clever ideas up our sleeve to help build communities around things that support the Library’s missions, but we’re always open to suggestions.

If you’re keeping score at home, in addition to Facebook, we’re also active on Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and iTunes U.

You might be surprised how much work and thought go into these new ventures.  If a person wants to connect with their friends or share a video or photo, they fill out a few text fields, submit an email address, and that’s it.

Government, on the other hand, is a whole different ball of wax.  There are special rules that apply to .gov sites that don’t pertain to others.  There are terms-of-service issues that might work as-is for individuals, but not necessarily for Uncle Sam.  There are many other considerations that are probably self-evident.  And of course, we’re assiduous protectors of copyright—and probably the Library of Congress moreso than others.  (The U.S. Copyright Office is three floors above me as I write this.)

There is a dedicated cadre of people here who decided that, conceptually, these are spaces into which we want to move, and they have set about finding ways to get us there.  If nothing else, the Library has content that people want, and we want to do our best bring it to them—not necessarily sit back and wait for them to find it.  I’m proud to work at a place that “gets it.”

On that note, let the friending begin!

(h/t to Chris Carlson for my crowdsourced headline)

Bestselling authors David Baldacci, John Grisham, John Irving, Julia Alvarez, Judy Blume, Ken Burns, Gwen Ifill, and Jodi Picoult–as well as celebrity chef Paula Deen–will be among scores of authors and illustrators presenting at the festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama are serving as Honorary Chairs.

Librarian of Congress James Billington thinks it’s “one of our most exciting author lineups ever,” and with eight years of festivals and hundreds of authors to look back on, that’s saying something.

The festival–where you can hear these and scores of other authors speak (free of charge), get books signed by the authors, and enjoy numerous activities including many designed for children and families–will take place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. between 7th and 14th Streets from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., rain or shine.

This year’s festival will incorporate several new social-networking features, including Twitter ( @librarycongress — and help us spread the word by using hashtag #nbf ), to more actively engage festivalgoers and help them receive the latest festival news, schedules and other information.

The full lineup of authors (more will be added as the event draws near) can be found here. The full press release is here.