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?

Dr. Richard E. Cytowic of George Washington University Medical Center will deliver the talk, “Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia” at 6:15 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30 in the Members’ Room on the first floor of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building at 10 First St. S.E. After the talk, he’ll sign his book on the topic.

Doors open one hour earlier! Don’t miss it!

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.)

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!)

For something like four generations he’s been cracking us up, from his writing and skit performance on the legendary Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” (external link) to his creation of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (external link) to his “2000-Year-Old Man” recordings with Mel Brooks; from his involvement in Steve Martin’s flicks to his role as Saul in the “Ocean’s 11” (external link) series of movies to his novels and kids’ books of recent years.

Carl Reiner is coming to the Library of Congress on Monday, October 26 at 1:30 p.m. to speak and sign his books. The event will be free and open to the public, and will be in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library’s James Madison Building at 101 Independence Ave., S.E. in Washington.

We’ll move the ottomans out of the way …

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!