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By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Vicky Steeves, National Digital Stewardship Resident at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. This is the first in a series of posts by the residents from NDSR class of 2014-2015. I wanted to take this opportunity, as the first 2014-2015 resident to post on …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Mike Ashenfelder
Some of you information professionals may have experienced incidents where, in the middle of a breezy conversation, you get caught off guard by a question about your work (“What do you do?”) and you struggle to come up with a straightforward, clear answer without losing the listener’s attention or narcotizing them into a stupor with …
Posted in: The Signal
As each liturgical season in the Christian year approaches, the NLS Music Section receives an increase in requests for choral masterworks, as well as many requests for some of the more famous requiems. If you asked anyone to name a famous oratorio, Messiah with its Hallelujah Chorus would most likely be at the top of …
Posted in: NLS Music Notes
By: Bryan Cornell
The following post is by David Sager, Processing Technician in the Recorded Sound Section, Library of Congress. This post is in commemoration of the 84th anniversary of Buddy Bolden’s death and the never-ending discussion of his legendary lost cylinder recording. Charles “Buddy” Bolden, 1877-1931, often referred to as the “first man of jazz,” holds an …
Posted in: Now See Hear!
What do bookplates tell us about book owners for whom they were designed? The small labels (also known as “ex libris”) were intended to be pasted inside an individual’s books to connect the book with its owner. But what other connections regarding the owner’s personal traits or interests might they reveal? Recently, we created an …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Kate Murray
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. During the first week of October, Kate Murray and I participated in the annual conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives in Cape Town, South Africa. Kate’s blog describes the conference. This blog …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Kate Murray
Upon seeing the Cape of Good Hope near Cape Town, South Africa, for the first time in 1580, Sir Francis Drake wrote in his diary that “this cape is the most stately thing and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth” And I have to say that I agree. In …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Trevor Owens
If you haven’t heard, as the title of the press release explains, the Library of Congress Seeks Halloween Photos For American Folklife Center Collection. As of writing this morning, there are now 288 photos shared on Flickr with the #folklifehalloween2014 tag. If you browse through the results, you can see a range of ways folks …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Barrie Howard, IT Project Manager at the Library of Congress. Last month the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) Program wrapped up the “2014 DPOE Training Needs Assessment Survey” in an effort to get a sense of the state of digital preservation practice and understand more about what …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Stephen Winick
The Following is a guest post by Judith Gray, ethnomusicologist and coordinator of reference in the American Folklife Center. In the last decades of the 19th century, Thomas Edison and his contemporaries in Europe created various devices for capturing sound [1]. These inventions, in turn, led to the creation of audiovisual archives. The first two …
Posted in: Folklife Today