Folk singer, activist and friend of the Library of Congress Pete Seeger passed away Monday in Manhattan. He was 94. The Library’s American Folklife Center and the Music Division are home to multiple collections documenting Seeger and his family’s extraordinary musical accomplishments. (The following is a repost from the American Folklife Center blog, Folklife Today.) Pete […]
Today we welcome the newest member of the Library of Congress blogosphere: Folklife Today, a new blog produced by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. AFC has one of the largest archives in the world relating to traditional folk culture. The center’s team of bloggers will be posting regularly with interesting information about its […]
(The following is a guest post by Kaydee McCann, humanities editor for the “Handbook of Latin American Studies” and reference librarian in the Hispanic Division.) Historian Natalia Silva Prada is a visiting researcher in the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. Supported by a fellowship from Goya Foods, she spent two months preparing an annotated bibliography […]
(The following is a guest post by Guha Shankar, folklife specialist in the American Folklife Center and the Library’s Project Director of the Civil Rights History Project, a Congressionally mandated documentation initiative that is being carried out in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.) Dr. Martin Luther King’s […]
(The following is a guest post by Guha Shankar, folklife specialist with the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.) A fall landscape of orange and red foliage rushes by a car winding down a long road…a stern-faced singer draws his bow across a single-stringed lute and sings a ballad in Serbian about the 1389 Battle […]
(Guest post by Michelle Springer, Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives) Jan. 16 is the two-year anniversary of the launch of the Library’s account on Flickr, the photosharing website. We started with approximately 3,100 photos in our account; today 30 additional archives, libraries, and museums from the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, the […]
This past Monday, Cheryl Regan of the Library’s Interpretive Programs Office (i.e., she’s in charge of exhibitions) was gracious enough to allow me to tip-toe around the fabrication materials and power tools over in the Thomas Jefferson Building and lead me on a behind-the-scenes tour of the installation of our new Library of Congress Experience.
We’re having a big public celebration and grand opening on April 12 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., so if you’re in DC, stop by to “explore, discover and be inspired.” (That’s the tagline that folks in the DC are hopefully starting to see on ads.) There will be plenty of time for a visit after the Cherry Blossom Parade ends.
There is truly a tremendous amount of activity occurring in the building (which is closed to the public, except the reading rooms, until April 12), and I just walked back from there to see that so much progress has been made even since I shot this video. Nevertheless, I hope it whets your appetite.
There is so much more I could have shown too, but I wanted to come in under the YouTube 10-minute limit. And for those of you who want to see the Library do even more with video behind my first rather amateurish attempt, well, just you wait.
A full transcript follows after the jump …
UPDATE: I replaced the herky-jerky video from the original post with a better version.