(The following is a guest post by William Kellum, manager in the Library’s Web Services Division.)
Educational Outreach
This month, we’re very happy to have a new release in the excellent series of Student Discovery Sets produced by the Library’s Education Outreach team. Designed for classroom use on Apple’s iPad platform, Student Discovery sets “bring together historical artifacts and one-of-a-kind documents on a wide range of topics, from history to science to literature. Interactive tools let students zoom in, draw to highlight details, and conduct open-ended primary source analysis. Full teaching resources are available for each set.” The new release includes sets on The New Deal, Scientific Data: Observing, Recording, and Communicating Information and Weather Forecasting. These materials are also available via the web as part of the Library’s Primary Source Sets.
You can read more about them on the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog.
American Folklife Center
The American Folklife Center is marking its 40th anniversary in 2016, celebrating the center’s role in the preservation and promotion of traditional culture with a series of events, programs, and other activities throughout the year. New to the Library’s website is the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection, the first online release of materials from approximately 25 ethnographic field projects and cultural surveys in various parts of the United States between 1977 and 1997. The Chicago collection includes photos, audio and the notes and reports of the AFC fieldworkers. This blog post on Folklife Today has more details and samples from the collection. Also new from AFC are four albums of music originally published on vinyl, now online for streaming and download: Folk music of the United States: Indian songs of today; Cowboy songs, ballads and cattle calls from Texas; American fiddle tunes; and Negro blues and hollers. Scans of the original album covers and liner notes are included on the pages (under the PDF link).
Wartime Collections
Expanding our extensive Civil War-related collections, the papers of reformer, poet, editor and clergyman William Oland Bourne span the years 1841-1885, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1856-1867. As editor of the periodical The Soldier’s Friend, Bourne sponsored a contest in 1865-1866 in which Union soldiers and sailors who lost their right arms by disability or amputation during the Civil War were invited to submit samples of their penmanship using their left hands. The online presentation contains correspondence and broadsides concerning the contests, many of the penmanship entries submitted and photographs of some contest participants.
World War I: American Artists View the Great War is an online exhibition of posters, cartoons, fine art prints and drawings chronicling World War I from its onset through its aftermath. You can visit the exhibition in person through May 6, 2017, at the Library’s Jefferson Building Graphic Arts Gallery.
Digital Collection Upgrades
Finally, we’re continuing our migration of old presentations to newer technologies. The latest to receive an upgrade is Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project, 1936-1938, which contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA).