LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

The LOC Veterans' History Project observes Memorial Day.

I know there are quite a few LISNews readers including Dr. de la Pena McCook, and myself that are related to veterans. Today take a brief moment to thank then for their service and remember those who have died.

I was in New York City this past week and it was Fleet Week. I was walking to my hotel on 51st near Rockefeller Plaza when I saw a group of high school students who were obviously in town on a tour turn and applaud a group of young sailors as they walked past. It must have taken the sailors half an hour to walk through the plaza as others thanked them and shook their hands.

Remember your veteran today, and remember all of the veterans who have served our nation to give us the freedoms we now enjoy.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

-John McCrae

We remember these honorable men and women not because of how they died, but because of how they lived.

The first trans-Atlantic broadcast, on March 14, 1925; Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia’s reading of the comics in 1945; and Michael Jackson’s 1982 best-seller “Thriller” were among 25 recordings added Wednesday to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. See what else is new there from the Associated Press.

WJLA Washington DC reports on a new exhibit at the Library of Congress that utilizes high tech exhibits to show the specific words and phrases that formed the basis of the American republic.

The exhibit allows visitors to see how the documents evolved. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, initially read "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal," but of course was revised by Ben Franklin to the less religious sounding "self-evident."

Sweet sixteen and never been to the Library of Congress? Now you can enter the Main Reading Room as a researcher--L.O.C. has changed its policy to allow 16 and 17 year olds.

From the press release:

"The Library of Congress is always looking for ways to create new lifelong learners, to expand access to knowledge and to spark the creativity of future generations," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.

"We want people of all ages to be aware of the almost limitless resources that are available in libraries, including their de facto national library, especially at a time when the amount of information online still represents only a tiny fraction of the sum total of human knowledge."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 8 million 16- and 17-year-olds living in the United States.

An interesting post from Webware on the use of tags with the Flickr/Library of Congress project. The post is on a presentation given at the Web 2.0 expo.

Technology can be used to heal both broken bones and cultural conflicts, James Billington, the 13th librarian of Congress, said Wednesday.

The Yale School of Medicine held the opening ceremony for the interactive exhibit “Medical Inventions and Innovations” in the school’s Harkness Auditorium yesterday afternoon. The ceremony coincided with the 60th annual lecture sponsored by the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Associates, delivered by Billington.

Billington’s talk, titled “Freedom as Strategy: The Importance of an Ideal,” focused on the issues of globalization and intercultural understanding. More from the Yale Daily News.

On this webpage, Learning from Katrina: Conservators' First-Person Accounts of Response and Recovery; Suggestions for Best Practice, you can find interviews with seven recovery volunteers who helped deal with the aftermath of Katrina. They helped the collecting institutions of the states hit to recover materials damaged by the hurricane and later shared their experiences and what they learned in these interviews.

This month's Wise Guide from the Library of Congress includes a short article, titled The Library Exposed about Carol M. Highsmith's photos of the Library of Congress Jefferson Building. The article links you to the Carol M. Highsmith Archive where these and other photos reside. Have a look at the 400+ photos of the LOC here.

This Library of Congress blog talks about the amazing success of their ongoing project to put content on Flickr to be viewed and tagged. In two days they had over a million views. Check out other stats at their blog.

The Library of Congress is partnering with Flickr to share access to some of its collections. It's titled The Commons. It's nice that the Library of Congress is seeking new ways to share its collections with those of that can't go to DC.