Library of Congress Blog

PBS tonight airs the long-awaited “Paul McCartney: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song In Performance at the White House” at 8 p.m. EDT, with an encore showing at 9:30.

It’s an all-star concert that features music from McCartney himself and Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Jonas Brothers, Herbie Hancock, Corinne Bailey Rae, Dave Grohl, Faith Hill, Emmylou Harris, Lang Lang and Jack White, with remarks by Jerry Seinfeld.

The Library announced in May that Sir Paul was to be the third recipient of the Gershwin Prize, which celebrates a lifetime of creative output in the realm of popular music.  President Barack Obama conferred the Prize on the legendary rocker last month at the White House during the taping of the performance that airs tonight.

To whet your palate, enjoy a couple of videos.  The first is a backstage look at the Jonas Brothers and their White House performance of “Drive My Car.”  The second is White Stripes frontman Jack White’s rendition of the hauntingly beautiful “Mother Nature’s Son.”

You can read a little more about it on the Music Division’s blog, “In the Muse.”

"Caricature Wielding Her Lash" by Honore Daumier

There are many avenues of research at the Library of Congress.

Some are a laugh riot!

Take, for example, the vast collections of cartoons and caricature in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. For more than a century, the Library has collected pictorial humor  – collections that range from a lifetime’s worth of cartoons by the late Washington Post political cartoonist Herb Block (“Herblock”) to more than 20,000 original cartoons by generations of America’s best cartoonists. 

There are also historical cartoons from such giants as 19th-century French artist Honoré Daumier (see above) to early American Paul Revere; arrays amassed by individuals, from Jack Kapp’s collection dealing with the sound-recording industry (including art by such figures as Rube Goldberg and Gluyas Williams – these are found in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division) to the Caroline and Erwin Swann Collection of Caricature and Cartoon, which records the development of U.S. newspaper funnies.

To explore the many ways that the pen has proven mightier than the sword at the Library of Congress – or at least, funnier – click here.

This is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, program officer with the Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

In 1975, Alan Jabbour and I began a project to document the fiddle playing of Senator Robert C. Byrd, who passed away a few days ago at the age of 92.  Sen. Byrd was aware that Alan and I had produced an extensive set of field recordings of the music and tales of other West Virginia musicians, notably the Hammons family of Marlinton.  The Hammons project took place in the early 1970s, when Alan was the head of the Archive of Folk Song (later known as the Archive of Folk Culture) and I worked for the public television station at West Virginia University.

Alan met Sen. Byrd at a public event where the senator played his fiddle and sang.  In 1975, Senator Byrd contacted Alan about making a recording of his own.  I drove over from Morgantown and Alan and I carried out our first session at Byrd’s home in McLean, Virginia.  In 1976, Alan moved back to the Library as the director of the American Folklife Center and I joined the center’s staff toward the end of the year.  Before long, Alan arranged for the senator to be recorded on the stage of the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium (no audience). I took photographs.

The initial recordings were added to the Library’s collections but Senator Byrd broached the idea of releasing an LP of his playing and singing with musical backup.  Alan contacted an old North Carolina friend, Barry Poss, who then worked at County Records.  Barry suggested we engage a group of top-notch bluegrass professional musicians to accompany the senator and bring in one of the region’s best engineers to make the recordings.

In sessions in early 1978, this stellar group — Robert Byrd, Doyle Lawson, James Bailey, and Spider Gilliam, aided by recording engineer Bill McElroy — laid down 14 tracks for the County label.  They were recorded right in the U.S. Capitol.  In October, the new release was presented with much fanfare at Discount Records near Dupont Circle in northwest Washington, DC.

This year, County went back to the original masters and digitally re-released the recordings as a compact disc (County CD-2743), illustrated with photographs from the Folklife Center’s collection.  Advance copies of the new CD were sent to the senator’s office as his health was failing and, as chance would have it, the re-release of “U.S. Senator Robert Byrd: Mountain Fiddler” coincided with Sen. Byrd’s passing.

Listening to the recordings today, I join many in a feeling of real loss.  But at the same time the music brings back a smile — especially when I hear the great politician sing, “I’ve gambled down in Washington, I’ve gambled over in Spain, now I’m down in Georgia to gamble my last game.”

Did you happen to catch the “CBS Evening News” last night?  They featured the latest audio recordings the Library has added to the National Recording Registry, which features everything from Jiminy Cricket and Little Richard to Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Tupac Shakur and a World War II battle.

As Katie Couric might say, Anthony Mason has the story.

As the story mentions, while the Librarian of Congress makes the final selection, anybody can nominate a recording. The criteria and instructions can be found here.

(The headline refers to a line in Mason’s story.)

The Librarian of Congress today named 25 new entries to the National Recording Registry, a designation given to recordings that are culturally, historically or aesthetically significant and at least 10 years old.  This year’s entries bring the total to 300 and include recordings made famous by a range of artists from Tupac Shakur, Little Richard and Bill Cosby to Loretta Lynn and Patti Smith.

One of the newly named recordings is a 1969 album by the rock group The Band.  It includes two well-known songs, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up On Cripple Creek.”

This album became a favorite when my older brother toted it home from college.  There was something gritty and uncontrived about the sound of this group – it almost seemed like material collected by Library of Congress folk researcher Alan Lomax.  We lived in Denver, and for years when we’d drive through the old mining towns in the nearby Rocky Mountains, tunes by the Band would come unbidden into my head:

 “Up on Cripple Creek, she sends me

If I spring a leak, she mends me.

I don’t have to speak, she defends me

A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one … “

For years, I couldn’t put my finger on why The Band’s sound was so evocative to me. Not long ago, I finally put it together.

After a lifetime of knowing zip about my family background farther back than a couple of generations, genealogy resources enabled me to identify some forebears who were alive in the mid-1800s.

They weren’t up on Cripple Creek, though – it was Clear Creek. 

If Hollywood ever made a movie of my paternal ancestors’ lives, music by The Band could be the soundtrack.

 Across the Great Divide –

Just grab your hat and take that ride!

Get yourself a bride

And bring your children down to the riverside.

In the late 1860s, my great-great-great grandfather Frank McCunniff and his son Tom hit it big in silver at a stake they dubbed the Pelican Mine, above Georgetown, Colorado.  The house Frank built is still there in Georgetown, and occupied.

The McCunniffs got into a drawn-out legal struggle with the owners of the next claim over. Much, if not most, of their wealth got litigated away. One of their employees, Jake Snider, was gunned down in the street. Eventually, Frank and Tom packed up their families, moved to the San Luis Valley in southwestern Colorado and took up ranching. A man named William Hamill bought the Pelican; one of his descendants is Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars” (which was inducted into the Library’s National Film Registry in 1989).

Music triggers memory – that’s well known. In this case, it touched a sonic chord for me that evoked a lifestyle, an historic atmosphere of some ancestors I didn’t yet know I had.

 I can feel you standing there

But I don’t see you

Anywhere …

Postscript:  My father, Tom Gavin, was brought up during the Great Depression in the San Luis Valley by his paternal grandmother Kate, the daughter of Tom McCunniff.  The following exchange caused him to view any talk of the Georgetown days as baloney:  “Grandma, Uncle Emmett tells me we had a silver mine in the family! I could get used to being a rich kid.”

“Tommy, if there had been any money left in this family when I met your grandfather, I’d never have married him, and you wouldn’t exist!”

The Library of Congress’ Flickr page has just put up 100 photocrom images of Italy (chiefly the charming northern lake regions), popular tourism destinations back in the Victorian and Edwardian eras and still popular today.  Soon, 400 images of Italy will be on the site.

Take a mental stroll around the beautiful Lake Como; be transported a bit farther south to the Isle of Capri and enjoy the glowing light inside the Blue Grotto.  

Here is the castle at Sirmione, which still stands, and has been made into an amazing spa on the site of an ancient Roman settlement. They make a delectable prosciutto Panini in Sirmione – just up the autostrada from Venice.  (No photocroms of the superhighway, for reasons that should be obvious.)

Don’t even think of getting into the left lane if you’re doing less than 85 mph.!

Beloved comedian Bob Hope’s legacy has gotten new legs with the opening of the Library of Congress exhibition “Hope for America: Performers, Politics & Pop Culture.” An online preview is available here.

“Hope for America” explores the special relationship between comedians and politicians and the way it changed in the century that encompassed Hope’s life and the years since his passing in 2003.

While powerful men have been letting funny foils lace their laughter with zingers since at least Shakespeare’s day (think King Lear and The Fool), Bob Hope, who was born in England, turned the free speech available on these shores into a veritable Zing-o-Matic. Presidents were a favorite target, and he was a favorite of at least 11 of those chief executives.

As the exhibition shows, he led the way for a tradition of U.S. political humor that continues even today, which has witnessed such phenomena as candidacies by comedians, some of whom have gone on to hold public office.

This new exhibition replaces a previous one in the same space, which focused on the history of vaudeville in the United States, the springboard for Hope’s own career.

“Hope for America” will draw from the treasured Bob Hope Collection, which was donated to the Library by the Hope family in 1998. On display will be Hope’s personal papers, joke files, films and radio and television broadcasts, along with other materials from the Library’s vast collections.

The exhibition also will examine entertainers’ involvement in a wide range of causes and campaigns, especially as leaders in supporting and entertaining American troops abroad. Hope’s commitment to public service for nearly 50 years on behalf of the men and women in the armed forces earned him many honors, including the U. S. Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“Hope for America: Performers, Politics & Pop Culture” is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday in the Library’s Bob Hope Gallery of American Entertainment on the ground floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St., S.E. in Washington, D.C.

Saturday, Sept. 25 will mark the 10th anniversary of the Library of Congress National Book Festival – “A Decade of Words and Wonder.”

If you’re among the hundreds of thousands of people who have attended the event in its first nine glorious years, or just want to know more about this celebration of books, the people who write them and the all-important people who read them, you’ll want to check out the Library’s new National Book Festival 2010 website.  

The site offers a number of new features this year (including some great retrospective video clips) and the new offerings will continue, so keep checking back. Also, look for a series of special events in the week leading up to this 10th anniversary festival.

But now, (drumroll) the question on everyone’s lips: who are this year’s authors?

Although the list is not yet complete, NBF10 will offer internationally known authors Isabel Allende, Brad Meltzer, Katherine Paterson, Jane Smiley, David Remnick, Scott Turow and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk.

And: Adele Logan Alexander, M.T. Anderson, Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, Ree Drummond, Timothy Egan, Bruce Feiler, illustrator Peter Ferguson, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mem Fox, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth George, Gail Godwin, Margaret Peterson Haddix, Philip Hoose, Norton Juster, Jules Feiffer, Elizabeth Kostova, Chang-rae Lee, Thomas Mallon, Marilyn Nelson, Michelle Norris, Nell Irvin Painter, Linda Sue Park, illustrator James Ransome, Richard Rhodes, Henry Petroski, graphic novelist Jeff Smith, Peter Straub, Evan Thomas and Judith Viorst. For more detail, click here.

 The 2010 National Book Festival will take place on the National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets, rain or shine.  The event, free and open to the public, will run from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Thursday, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington had an announcement sure to thrill hundreds of thousands of people who’ve loved the National Book Festival during its storied run, “a decade of words and wonder.”

He announced that David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and managing director of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group, is donating $5 million to provide major support to the National Book Festival (which will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year on Saturday, Sept. 25) for the next five years.

“The ability to learn how to read and love reading got me where I am today,” said Rubenstein, who reads six to eight books a week. 

“The festival brings young and old alike face-to-face with authors in a one-day event that lives on long after the last reading,” Rubenstein told a delighted crowd at the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, steps away from Thomas Jefferson’s personal collection of books that re-established the Library of Congress after the British torched the Capitol in 1814. “With this gift, the festival will be secure in its funding for years to come.”

Also celebrating the gift on Thursday were bestselling author David Baldacci and several families who have enjoyed the National Book Festival for years.  

Rubenstein is a member of the Library’s James Madison Council, a private-sector advisory group, and in recent years has been generous with both his time and with funding for cultural and educational institutions in several states. He’s also the incoming chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

But before all that, he was a kid whose dad would send him to Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt public library, where he’d check out the maximum number of books allowed each week – 12 – and devour them.

Thomas Jefferson said he could not live without books, and “I am never more happy than when I am alone with my books … it’s one of the joys of my life,” Rubenstein said. But more than that, he said, reading is the foundation of success in life.

He’s alarmed at what he termed both illiteracy and aliteracy in the United States today. Not only is the rate of U.S. illiteracy too high, he said, there are too many people who can read, but don’t. 

“Eighty percent of families in the United States didn’t buy a book last year,” he said. “Seventy percent have not visited a bookstore in the past five years. Forty-two percent of college graduates never read a book after they graduate from college.”

The Library’s programs to interest people of all ages in reading and literacy, from its website Read.gov and its Center for the Book to the beloved National Book Festival, can help turn that around, Rubenstein said.

Thursday’s generous donation, which will be overseen by a board including Rubenstein and Dr. Billington, “is really a down payment on helping to endow the National Book Festival,” Rubenstein said.

He also called the gift a thank-you to Dr. Billington, for his outstanding career ensuring that the Library of Congress has blazed a trail in the digital world and serves as the world’s greatest national library.

“If Thomas Jefferson were here today, he’d say ‘Dr. Billington, you’ve done a great job’ shepherding his library,” Rubenstein said.

Dana Delany and Tim Daly of The Creative Coalition look down upon a VIP reception at the Library of Congress on April 29, 2010. (Abby Brack photo)

Tim Daly gingerly wound his way up a narrow spiral staircase to a low-ceilinged, vaulted alcove overlooking the ornate Ceremonial Office of the Librarian of Congress.  Surveying the VIPs on the crowded floor below–members of Congress, Hollywood A-listers, Library leadership–he pulled out a digital camera to capture the celebratory moment.  Then he paused.

“I wonder if I should shout at them to look up for a group photo,” he mused aloud.  “No, I can’t shout, I’m in a library,” he said, an ironic statement that could barely be heard above the clamorous reception a few feet down.

So even the president couldn’t bring order to this room.  Or the co-president, anyway.

Daly (of TV’s “Private Practice” and “Wings”) and Dana Delany (“Desperate Housewives,” “China Beach”), who share the title of co-presidents of The Creative Coalition (TCC), were in Washington, D.C., to lead the group’s annual advocacy efforts on Capitol Hill, focusing on issues such as free speech and copyright protection.

But last Thursday night at the Library, they and many other big names in the entertainment industry balanced an audiovisual-preservation message with merriment in a lighthearted Coolidge Auditorium program called “Art & Soul: A Celebration of the American Spirit.”

The evening began with a relatively rare sight in the mid-Atlantic: a full-on red-carpet arrival into the Library’s awe-inspiring Great Hall–well, minus the actual red carpet.  No reason to conceal the sprawling, historic marble floor.

After the celebs cleared security (we’re all D-listers at the magnetometers, darling), they strutted past a throng of flashbulbs and video cameras, turning toward the photographers calling out their names in hope of scoring a better angle from behind the velvet rope.

Adrian Grenier of "Entourage" and "The Devil Wears Prada" (Abby Brack photo)

Some scurried off to practice their lines.  Others such as Adrian Grenier (“Entourage,” “The Devil Wears Prada”) lingered patiently, mugging for the cameras and submitting happily to every last interview request and fan photo.

Once past the paps, the performers–also including CCH Pounder, Cheryl Hines, Howard Fineman, Omar Epps, Marlon Wayans, Gloria Reuben, Steven Weber, Wendie Malick, Richard Schiff, Spike Lee and Patricia Arquette–retreated to the greenroom backstage.

When the lights went down in the Coolidge, TCC Chairman Michael Frankfurt and Chief Executive Officer Robin Bronk, along with Delany and Daly, took to the stage to, well, set the stage.

Frankfurt said “Art & Soul” was meant to “celebrate American art and highlight the Library of Congress’s incomparable recorded sound, TV, film and an unforgettable history.”  Delany praised the arts as “the soul of our nation,” influencing aspects of life such as education and the economy.  Bronk thanked the Library for hosting TCC and admitted her awe at being “in the presence of history.”

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington is presented The Creative Coalition's 2010 Spotlight Award by Spike Lee and Patricia Arquette. (Abby Brack photo)

Before the scripted show began–”unplugged, unfiltered and … unrehearsed,” in the words of Tom Fontana, who conceived and staged “Art & Soul” and created such series as “Oz”–Director Spike Lee and Patricia Arquette of TV’s “Medium” paired up to honor the Library’s own role in supporting their industry.

The duo presented TCC’s 2010 Spotlight Award to Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, an honor that “recognizes individuals and organizations who are dedicated to improving the quality of life for all Americans and who have exhibited a long-standing commitment to the Arts.”  Lee, an avid NBA fan, couldn’t help pointing out that both Billington and L.A. Laker Kobe Bryant attended Philadelphia’s Lower Merion High School.

The Creative Coalition's 2010 Spotlight Award (Abby Brack photo)

Lee and Arquette praised Billington for his leadership role in efforts to preserve film and recorded sound, such as the National Film Registry and the National Recording Registry, and the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va., which was a focus of the evening’s program.

But Billington wasted no time in deflecting much of the credit.

“In honoring me, and I do deeply appreciate this, you’re really honoring dedicated public servants, staff, under (Packard Campus Director) Pat Loughney’s admirable direction,” Billington said.

And as he so often does, Billington touted Congress as “the greatest patron of a library in the history of the world,” pointing out that Congress under Article I of the Constitution is empowered to “preserve and encourage and foster and reward the creative people of the country, rather than just what the governments have produced.”

Then the stars took to the stage, two-by-two (with the exception of the hilarious trio of Epps, Wayans and Reuben), to tout the importance of preservation and the Library’s role in it.

Steven Weber, left, and Tim Daly stage a mock "reunion" of their 1990s NBC television show, "Wings." (Library of Congress/Abby Brack photo)

Lee and Newsweek’s Fineman commented on historic films and audio from the Library’s collections, such as the crash of the Hindenburg and Marian Anderson’s 1939 performance of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” at the Lincoln Memorial.  “The Packard Campus ensures that our cultural heritage and our current history will be available to study and enjoy for centuries,” Fineman said.

Epps, Wayans and Reuben traced the history of recorded sound, while Malick and Grenier celebrated America’s musical heritage. Hines and Weber played a fictional husband and wife who marveled at “the first television set,” with Weber making wild predictions about the future existence of anchormen and pundits.  And Pounder and Schiff talked about movies that, in Schiff’s words, “are truly transcendent.”

Tim Daly and Dana Delany returned to the stage to end the show, noting a number of historic movies and broadcasts that have been forever lost to history, and the urgency of ensuring that others in the future don’t meet the same grim fate.

Maybe The Creative Coalition’s co-president didn’t get his group photo.  But he helped bring the issue of preserving our nation’s cultural heritage into much sharper focus.

Twitter’s gift (link is PDF) to the Library of Congress of its entire archive of public tweets, announced two weeks ago today, sure has stoked the public’s interest.  (Also included as addenda to the previous link were Twitter’s current and previous terms of service.)

I’ve been working in journalism and public relations for nearly 20 years, and of all the stories with which I was personally involved, this one has beaten the rest by a mile. Thousands of hits on Google News.  Countless blog posts from around the world.  Media interest from virtually every national newspaper and broadcast outlet (which continues even two weeks later), and numerous local outlets.  And websites as diverse as The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, and even Perez Hilton.

And of course, a lively discussion, to say the least, within the Twitterverse itself.  On the day of the announcement, I set up a Twitterfall that looked more like Niagara than a trickle.  (A definite highlight of my life was having been retweeted by Alyssa Milano.)

Given all of that interest, we wanted to put out an FAQ.  Most if not all of these answers have been published on our site and elsewhere, but we thought they should be collected in a single place.  These may be updated as appropriate:

Why is it important to preserve the Twitter archive?

Twitter is part of the historical record of communication, news reporting, and social trends – all of which complement the Library’s existing cultural heritage collections.  It is a direct record of important events such as the 2008 U.S. presidential election or the “Green Revolution” in Iran.  It  also serves as a news feed with minute-by-minute headlines from major news sources such as Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.  At the same time, it is a platform for citizen journalism with many significant events being first reported by eyewitnesses.

The Library of Congress collections include items such as the very first telegram ever sent, by telegraph inventor Samuel F.B. Morse, oral histories from veterans and ordinary citizens, and many other firsthand accounts of history.  These collections and others have left behind glimpses of the lives of ordinary people, thereby enriching knowledge of the context of public events recorded in government documents and newspapers.  Individually tweets might seem insignificant, but viewed in the aggregate, they can be a resource for future generations to understand life in the 21st century.

The Library did not pay for the archive; rather, it was a gift from Twitter.

What is in the Archive?

Twitter has been a public and open communications platform since its beginning. Twitter is donating an archive of what it determines to be public.  Private account information and deleted tweets will not be part of the archive. Linked information such as pictures and websites is not part of the archive, and the Library has no plans to collect the linked sites. There will be at least a six-month window between the original date of a tweet and its date of availability for research use.

What does the Library plan to do with the archive?

First and foremost, the Library is interested in preserving access to the archive for the long term.  In addition to looking at preservation issues, the Library will be working with academic research communities to explore issues related to researcher access.  The Twitter collection will serve as a helpful case study as we develop policies for research use of our digital archives. Tools and processes for researcher access will be developed from interaction with researchers as well as from the Library’s ongoing experience with serving collections and protecting privacy and rights.

The Library is not Twitter and will not try to reproduce its functionality.  We are interested in offering collections of tweets that are complementary to some of the Library’s digital collections: for example, the National Elections Web Archive or the Supreme Court Nominations Web Archive. We will make an announcement when the collection is available for research use.

One of the complaints heard from non-fans of classical music is that so much of it reaches back centuries. As one wag, who preferred jazz, put it: “Mozart hasn’t written anything decent in 200 years!”

And yet classical, as a genre, continues to unfold even in our lifetimes.  Which means there may be among us the composer who will someday be seen by the world the way we view Beethoven or Mozart — or Bernstein, or Shostakovich, to cite a couple more recent examples.  They wrote for their own contemporary audiences, and not all their story lines were highfalutin’ myths – think “Fidelio” (about a foe of the state, unjustly imprisoned), “The Marriage of Figaro” (about a serving-man who outsmarts the noble who’s got his eye on Figaro’s fiancée) “Candide” (in this romp, naïve young people learn a whole lot, fast) or “The Nose” (an absurd tale about a man whose nose takes off and becomes a higher-ranking official than he is). 

On Friday, May 14, at noon, American composer John Adams, whose operas are based on such characters as former President Richard Nixon and atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, will speak at the Library of Congress about his biography, “Hallelujah Junction.” The event, to be held in the Whittall Pavilion, ground floor of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building at 10 First St. S.E. in Washington, D.C., will be free and open to the public; no tickets are necessary.

Adams, 63, whose work includes the operas “Nixon in China,” “The Death of Klinghoffer” and “Dr. Atomic” (he frequently collaborates with director Peter Sellars)  also writes symphonic music and string quartets, and conducts. His piece “On the Transmigration of Souls,” written to commemorate the first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003. 

This week (Thursday May 13-Saturday May 15) Adams will conduct a National Symphony Orchestra program (Thursday at 7 p.m. , Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.) at the Concert Hall at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.  The program will open with Adams’ piece for baritone and orchestra “The Wound-Dresser,” based on a poem by Walt Whitman. Bass-baritone Eric Owens will perform the work.  That program will also include a suite from Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.”  Prior to the Saturday night performance, at 6 p.m. in the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Gallery, there will be a screening of the documentary “John Adams: A Portrait.”

Next week, May 20-22, Adams will conduct the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center in performances by violinist Leila Josefowicz of Adams’ “Dharma at Big Sur,” described by the Chicago Tribune as “a lyrical, ecstatic homage to the West Coast beat culture of Jack Kerouac.”  Josefowicz plays a specially designed, six-string electric violin in the piece.  That concert will also feature Adams’ “Doctor Atomic Symphony,” based on themes from his opera “Doctor Atomic” and works by Britten and Stravinsky. The Friday performance is a 1:30 p.m. matinee, the Thursday performance is at 7 p.m. and the Saturday performance is at 8 p.m.

Here, from Adams’ website, is his description of his piece “City Noir,” published last year.

Audrey Fischer of the Library’s Public Affairs Office offers this guest blog item for Saturday:

April 24 marks the Library’s 210th anniversary. Let it be said that the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution keeps getting better with age.

In 2000, the Library of Congress celebrated its bicentennial. That same year it embarked on a mission to lead the nation’s effort to preserve “at-risk” digital collections. It was perhaps that leadership effort and the institution’s foray into Web 2.0 that positioned the Library to answer the call to preserve Twitter’s digital archive of public tweets.

 From cuneiform tablets to concise e-messages, and everything in between, the nation’s library—now in its third century— continues to fulfill its mission to preserve the record of human creativity.

Close-up view, half-length, of Statue of Liberty showing the "tablet of law" held in left hand, inscribed July IV, MDCCLXXVI. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The history of our nation — from the earliest settlers through the present day — is a story of ambition and resilience, a story of human ingenuity conquering the impossible.

In its new epic series “America The Story of Us,” which premieres Sunday night (April 25) at 9 p.m. EDT, HISTORY will retell the extraordinary tale of how America was invented, using CGI animation and dramatic recreations to shed light on our common history.

In conjunction with the creation of “America The Story of Us,” HISTORY turned to the Library of Congress’s collections to create a short-form video about the untold story of the Statue of Liberty (officially called “Liberty Enlightening the World”) — one of the most recognizable images associated with America’s story.  Visit History.com to find out how Lady Liberty made her way to the United States and to her permanent home in New York Harbor.

Many Library of Congress images are used, and even an early Thomas Edison film that was the first moving picture ever made of the Statue of Liberty. (mpeg link)

The Library and HISTORY two years ago entered into a series of collaborative efforts to make the Library’s collections more widely accessible, and to enhance HISTORY’s programming, website and educational materials with primary sources from the Library.

One of the coolest projects on which we worked with HISTORY was a series of several videos with curators telling the fascinating stories behind some of our most unique objects, titled “This Week’s Hidden Treasure.”

[UPDATE: We posted an FAQ on April 28]

Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service?  Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.

That’s right.  Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress.  (By the way, out of sheer coincidence, the announcement comes on the same day our own number of feed-followers has surpassed 50,000. I love serendipity!)

We will also be putting out a press release later with even more details and quotes.  Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition.  I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data.  And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.

Just a few examples of important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).

Twitter plans to make its own announcement today on its blog from “Chirp,” the Official Twitter Developer Conference, in San Francisco.  (UPDATE: Here’s their post.)

So if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000.  Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.

In other words, if you’re looking for a place where important historical and other information in digital form should be preserved for the long haul, we’re it!

(Thanks to my co-blogger, Jennifer, for the headline.  She always does a much better job of that than I do!)

On Tuesday, April 20 at noon, 16 actors will appear at the Library of Congress’ Whittall Pavilion to deliver more world-famous iambic pentameter than you can shake a spear at.

It’s the annual Shakespeare’s Birthday reading, a chapter in the “Poetry at Noon” series presented by the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center.  (It’s Shakespeare’s 446th.)

The actors, from the Shakespeare Theater Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at The George Washington University, will not only deliver the words but will act them out for the audience – wordplay may be joined by swordplay.

Poetry at Noon is free and open to the public.  The Whittall Pavilion is on the ground floor (for all you groundlings) of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St., S.E., Washington, D.C.