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?

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.

They sang along with Mitch.

Between 1961 and 1965, many Americans young and old learned the tunes and lyrics to a raft of “standards” watching a black-and-white NBC-TV show featuring a guy named Mitch Miller. The goateed Miller (off-camera, a high-profile record producer) would choral-direct “The Gang,” tidy rows of men wearing tidy shirts, sweaters and slacks. In a baritone barrage, they’d lay down a melody, breaking into simple-but-tasteful harmony on the choruses. These were songs every American was presumed to just know, but for those who didn’t, the words were flashed at the bottom of the TV screen. And if you were a kid and didn’t know the songs yet, after learning them from Mitch and The Gang you could enjoy your newfound knowledge of the tunes when Mad Magazine recycled them into satirical songs with ridiculous new lyrics.

The Library of Congress recently acquired more than 300 reels of 16-millimeter kinescopes of “Sing Along With Mitch,” to be housed in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. After cataloging, a process expected to take several months, the collection will be available to researchers via the Performing Arts Reading Room on Capitol Hill. These kinescopes no doubt include this favorite, sung to a tune from John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever”:

Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody’s mother;

Be kind to your friends in the swamp, where the weather is very very dawmp.

Now you may think that this is the end …

Well, it is!

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!

The site aggregates other channels from across the government and features select video content.

The channel is broken down into handy playlists by topic such as Health and Nutrition, Science and Technology, and History, Arts and Culture — the category into which the Library falls.

What do you think about the government (and your de facto national library) moving into spaces like YouTube?  What kind of additional content would you like to see?

We have temporarily put that video on the front page of our relatively new YouTube channel.

We are starting with more than 70 videos, arranged in the following playlists: 2008 National Book Festival author presentations, the Books and Beyond author series, Journeys and Crossings (a series of curator discussions), “Westinghouse” industrial films from 1904 (I defy you to watch some of them without thinking of the Carl Stalling song “Powerhouse”), scholar discussions from the John W. Kluge Center, and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison, including the first moving image ever made (curiously enough, a sneeze by a man named Fred Ott).

But this is just the beginning. We have made a conscious decision that we’re not just going to upload a bunch of videos and then walk away. As with our popular Flickr pilot project, we intend to keep uploading additional content. We’re modifying some of our work-flows in modest ways to make our content more useful and delivered across platforms with built-in audiences of millions.

Not so incidentally, all of the videos we post on YouTube will also be available at LOC.gov (and many, many more, of course) on American Memory, many of which are newly digitized in much higher resolution by the fine Motion Picture, Broadcast and Recorded Sound conservators in Culpeper, Va.

And now for something completely different: boxing cats!