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“Light and liberty go together.”

It’s sometimes said that if you want a really steady income, become an undertaker.

There’s no doubt right now that times are tough all over.  The news media is among the industries that have been hit especially hard–in this case, by factors including changing technology and news-consumption habits, but also by lower ad revenues from the weak economy.

If there is a silver lining to be found behind that big ol’ cumulonimbus, however, it is that those same news media are generously donating much of their unsold ad inventory to important public-service messages.

Many of those messages are made possible by the Ad Council, which works with ad agencies on a pro bono basis, in conjunction with partners such as government agencies, to produce important public-service campaigns.  A couple of well-known examples are Smokey Bear’s anti-forest-fire admonitions, and Vince and Larry, those wacky crash-test dummies.  An article in The New York Times examines this trend.

The Library of Congress for the past several years has proudly been one of those Ad Council partners–initially promoting the value of learning history, and now getting out the word about reading.  One of the outcomes of that partnership has been our great (if I must say so myself) website, Literacy.gov.

To date, our Ad Council partnership has yielded a donated media value of more than a quarter of a billion dollars–billion, with a B–for these important messages.  (Coincidentally or not, The New York Times has been one of the single biggest supporters of our literacy campaign.  I’ve noticed a few of our full-page PSAs in that newspaper in the past several months.)

Hard times are known to bring out the best in people, so it is good to see a few of the ways some folks are giving of themselves to help others.

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The Library of Congress acquires some 10,000 items a day for its collections. But many of our finest acquisitions are not bound between leather covers or captured on a reel of celluloid: They are the people who make our collections come alive, who unearth meaning and inspiration among our 653 miles of stacks.
One such

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This week’s Newsweek has a lengthy profile of our Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan. It’s a fascinating read, and I’d commend it to your attention.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Kay a few times and talking with her several more times, and I think the article does a wonderful job of capturing her personality,

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Blog. Twitter. YouTube.  iTunes.  Yeah, we speak Web 2.0.
You nation’s Library has millions of stories to tell, so we’re trying to tell them as many places and to as many people as possible–whether on our own website or elsewhere.  And now you can add another biggie to the list: iTunes U.
For those who don’t know,

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Starting about two decades ago, the Library of Congress–under the direction of Librarian of Congress James Billington–began moving more ambitiously into the K-12 education space than it had previously. In 1990 the Library began a pilot program to distribute digital primary-source materials on CD-ROM to classrooms. The program, known as American Memory, has

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If you’ve visited this blog before, you might be doing a double-take.
The Web Services team here at the Library (who are doing some simply amazing things) has given the blog a fresher look and new functionality. First, there’s a cleaner, more aesthetic look to it, and I like how the collections are now highlighted in

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Let’s take a little test. I’m going to say a word, and you’re going to say the next word that leaps into your mind. OK, here goes:
Nabokov.
You said “Lolita,” right?
Of course. Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” published in 1955 and made into a film directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, is the work most identified with

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Long before we were being sold something (through advertising jingles) or somebody (through campaign ads), presidential campaign seasons brought out the songwriter in many a partisan.  This unique niche of Americana is celebrated in a new Library of Congress exhibition on the web, titled “Voices, Votes, Victory: Presidential Campaign Songs.”
The tradition of writing songs extolling

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My capacity for metaphors is somewhat limited, so forgive me if I repeat a word I tweeted recently (”tweet-peat”?): Yesterday the Library and the NEH held a news conference celebrating the “odometer” of the Chronicling America program’s surpassing 1 million digitized pages from historic newspapers. Seven new partner states have been added, bringing the total to 22.

This past Friday morning, the site hosted more than 975,000 pages. That same day, the system was updated, bringing the total to 1,249,747 pages. Not to be too specific.

A text-heavy page of this morning’s Washington Post took me about 14 minutes to read, top to bottom. At that rate, I could read day and night for the next 33 years and still not get through every page on Chronicling America.

As I reported last week, the site itself has also been upgraded and enhanced for users.

If you haven’t taken the time to explore Chronicling America, give it a shot — but beware: If you love history, or if you delight in the quaint prose of American journalism circa 1900, you might find several hours elapse seemingly in minutes. As the media have reported (here and here, for instance), there are many great discoveries to be made.

As participants in the event noted, even though the pages are digitized from microfilm, searching them is a far cry from the days of hunching over a microfilm reader and turning a crank in (often vain) hopes of spotting the right article. The database is fully text-searchable, and searches can be restricted by a variety of variables such as date, state and newspaper. It also includes a sprawling listing of 140,000 newspapers published in America since 1690 with details on where to find those that don’t yet exist in digital form.

High-resolution images can be saved and printed, along with basic PDFs, and each page has its own permalink. Wouldn’t it be great to see some of them start showing up on sites like Wikipedia — for instance, the page above linked to the entry about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake?

A few months back, I speculated about what the 1 millionth page might be. Turns out it was too hard to pick just one, especially when so many partners are contributing so much. Instead, the partners picked 11 ceremonial “1 millionth pages” [PDF link], each with an interesting story to tell.

After the jump is an excerpt from remarks made at the news conference by Associate Librarian for Library Services Deanna Marcum. (Below she is pictured at the podium with Acting NEH Chairman Carole Watson in the background. Photo courtesy of NEH by frasierphoto.com.)

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Media consumers today are bombarded with imagery of current events — some of them ephemeral, on our TV screens, and some more indelible.
A century ago, the use of halftone images was beginning to revolutionize newspapers and bringing the immediacy of photography to the masses.
Today the Library launched a new photostream on our Flickr page to

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