Library of Congress Blog
“Light and liberty go together.”

I stopped by our Prints and Photographs Division this afternoon to meet blogging legend Robert Scoble, partly because he was interviewing Helena Zinkham, the acting chief of P&P, about our Flickr project, but also to tell him how his book “Naked Conversations” has had an important impact on impelling the Library’s blog forward.  Before I knew it, he had turned his camera on me and beamed an interview live to the world via 3G.  (Shameless self-promotion alert.)

Robert is also working on a more in-depth piece on the Flickr project, which I’m eager to see.  It’s always great when the HD camera comes out!

While I’m at it, in recent days and weeks, there has been a lot of Web 2.0 momentum building here at the Library.  I’m confident that this will soon lead to new ways in which we will reaching out to user communities and making the Library’s yummy goodness even more widely known and accessible.

Tomorrow is Constitution Day, when we celebrate the Sept. 17, 1787, signing of that foundational document.  If you’re a student who is putting the finishing touches on an assignment or essay, or a teacher who wants to inspire his or her class, you have come to the right place.

The Library of Congress has excellent Constitution Day resources, including this page that has been updated to reflect materials in the new exhibition “Creating the United States.”

The Law Library of Congress also has a site entitled “A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates.”  The THOMAS legislative tracking system also has links to a number of Library sites about the Constitution.

When delegates to the Constitutional Convention adjourned their business, Benjamin Franklin famously replied to a woman who had asked what kind of government had just been formed: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

It was an audacious experiment, launched by a group of men both ordinary and extraordinary, and it has been tested many times.  But 221 years later, we are still here.

Carol Highsmith brings us more (copyright-free) photos from the closing-night convention festivities in the Twin Cities:

John McCain accepts the presidential nomination

Sarah Palin waves to the delegates

As in Denver, St. Paul had its share of protesters

Cindy McCain joins her husband on stage

The running mates and their spouses

Balloons!

Photos from Wednesday in St. Paul are here.

You can find photos from Denver here and here.

“Talk, talk, talk,” you say.  “That’s all Matt does is talk to the 2008 National Book Festival Authors.  But when will we, the readers and fans of those authors, get a chance to ask the questions?!”

Well, you can come in person, of course, to the National Book Festival on Sept. 27, 2008, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on the National Mall in DC.  But if you just can’t wait that long, our longtime charter sponsor, The Washington Post, has begun to schedule online chats with National Book Festival authors.

The first three have been scheduled, and are as follows:

Bob Schieffer (CBS newsman and author), Monday, 9/15 at 2 p.m. EDT

Arthur and Pauline Frommer (noted travel writers), Tuesday, 9/16 at 10 a.m. EDT

And Alexander McCall Smith, (prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction), Friday, 9/19 at 11 a.m. EDT

You can follow the links above and start submitting your questions now, or anytime up to and even during the chats.  We expect to be able to announce at least a couple more in the days leading up to Sept. 27.

(By the way, two years ago we did about six author podcasts. In 2007 we doubled that. This year, I expect we’ll get pretty close to, if not more than, 20! To subscribe in iTunes, go here.)

Carol Highsmith reports in with images from last night at the convention in St. Paul:

Former Sen. Bob Dole chats with the North Carolina delegation

Gov. Sarah Palin takes the stage

The delegates react

Sen. John McCain joins the Palin family on stage

(Pictures from Denver can be found here and here.)

Carol Highsmith sent some images from yesterday’s final day of convention festivities in Denver:

In case you missed it, Wednesday is here.

As the Gulf Coast holds its collective breath in preparation for Tropical Storm Gustav, it does so with an eerie sense of deja vu: It was exactly three years ago today that Hurricane Katrina made its devastating landfall.

The Digital Reference Team at the Library of Congress has updated the Today in History page for Aug. 29 in acknowledgment of that anniversary. The page includes many compelling historical resources about New Orleans, the Gulf states, hurricanes and related topics.

And it begins with haunting personal recollections from Storycorps (an oral-history project that is archived in the Library’s American Folklife Center):

I don’t b’lieve that was no dream. And you know what? It’s gon’ linger with us, it’s gon’ be with us, until the rest of my life i’ gone, y’know, it gonna linger, it gonna be there with me.

(Thanks, Colleen!)

UPDATE: The Preservation Directorate has launched a new Web page, “Learning From Katrina,” which deals with preservation issues in the wake of disasters. The page is here.

UPDATE 2: The Geography and Map Division has updated its “Places in the News” page with an Atlantic hurricane tracking chart.

Our “convention correspondent,” Carol M. Highsmith, burned the midnight oil to file her first dispatches from Denver (after 1 a.m. local time!) As promised, we bring you a sampling of the copyright-free images. And as previously mentioned, we will also post some highlights next week from the Twin Cities.

President Bill Clinton Fires up the delegates.

Senator Joe Biden accepts his party’s vice-presidential nomination.

Senator Barack Obama joins his running mate on stage.

Some of the more colorful hat-wear among delegates.

Protesters Shannon Collins and Olivia Christian.

The Brookings Institution this week rated 61 federal Web sites based on 18 criteria such as publications, databases, audiovisual material, disability access, personalization, and privacy and security policies.  This blog’s mother ship, LOC.gov, ranked No. 8.  The full PDF report is here.  (Congrats to our friends at USA.gov!)

We’re constantly working to enhance our Web presence, to present more content in more useful ways, and to improve the user experience.  And we’re doing it all with one thing in mind: you.

If you’re new to LOC.gov or myLOC.gov–or even if you’re not–take a moment to look around, then come back and let us know what you think.  What are we doing right?  Where do you think we have room for improvement?

Time was, the most common question we would get at the Library of Congress was, “Where are all the books?” (The answer is here.)

But a new question has begun to rival that query in frequency: “Where is the ‘Book of Secrets’?”

Well, for the next month, at least, you can find it at the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson Building.

The December 2007 movie “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” has been written about here before. The heroes of the smash Walt Disney Pictures sequel came to the real Library of Congress in search of the movie’s title tome, en route to big treasure. The book (as far as even some of us in the government know, at least) is fictitious, but the prop “Book of Secrets” has proven an object of fascination. It is richly detailed and contains calligraphic reproductions of the handwriting of every president from Washington to Clinton, as well as conspiracy-related ephemera of all kinds.

The “Book of Secrets,” along with the prop “John Wilkes Booth’s diary” (a movie version of an actual historical object) are part of a special display at the Library through Sept. 27. The display features not only the props, but also images from scenes shot at the Library, along with a looping video of two bonus features from the movie’s DVD: a behind-the-scenes look at the Library itself, along with the making of the “Book of Secrets” prop.

Just don’t ask us what’s on page 47!