Posts Tagged ‘Library of Congress’
“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected”*…
Readers may recall an earlier post on John B. Sparks’ Histomap, a well-known 1931 attempt to visualize the 4,000 year history of global power. Public Domain Review takes a look at Histomap‘s ancestor/inspiration, Friedrich Strass’ Der Strom der Zeiten (published in 1803), and its influence…
In his foundational textbook Elements, the Alexandrian mathematician Euclid defined a line as “breadthless length” — a thing with only one dimension. That’s what lines can do to history when used to plot events: they condense its breadth into pure motion, featuring only those people and places that serve as forces thrusting it forwards along an infinite axis. Early in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Strass proposed a different way to visualize time’s flow. A Prussian historian and schoolteacher, he published his chronological chart in 1803, a massive diagram titled Der Strom der Zeiten oder bildliche Darstellung der Weltgeschichte von den altesten Zeiten bis zum Ende des achtzehnden Jahrhunderts (The stream of the times or an illustrated presentation of world history from the most ancient times until the eighteenth century). The linear timelines that Strass resisted, like those inspired by Joseph Priestley, “implied a uniformity in the processes of history that was simply misleading”, write Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg. Strass’ stream, by contrast, allowed historical events to “ebb and flow, fork and twist, run and roll and thunder.” It would spawn several imitations as the century drew on…
Capturing history in its organic unfolding: “The Stream of Time,” from @PublicDomainRev. See the original at the David Rumsey Map Collection.
* Reif Larsen
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As we contemplate chronology, we might recall that it was on this date in 1800 that the Library of Congress was established. James Madison has first proposed a national library in 1783. But it wasn’t until 1800, when (on this date) President John Adams signed signed an act of Congress providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington, that the deed was done. The Act appropriated $5,000 “for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress … and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them.” Books were ordered from London, creating a collection consisting of 740 books and three maps, which were housed in the new United States Capitol.
But in 1814, during the War of 1812, British forces burned the Capitol Building, and with it, the the collection (by then, around 3,000 volumes). The Library as we know it was created from those ashes. Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his personal library– 6,487 books– as a replacement, Congress accepted, and the Library of Congress grew from there.
“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, / And all the sweet serenity of books”*…
Righteous recycling: garbage collectors in Ankara started “reclaiming” discarded books and ended up opening a library….
It all started when sanitation worker Durson Ipek found a bag of cast-off books when he was working and then it snowballed from there. Ipek and other garbage men started gathering the books they found on the streets that were destined for landfills and as their collection started to grow, so did word of mouth. Soon, local residents started donating books directly.
The library that originally contained 200 books is located in the Cankaya district of the capital city in a previously vacant brick factory at the sanitation department headquarters. The library was initially available only to the sanitation employees and their families to use but as the collection grew, so did public interest and the library was opened to the public in December 2017…
All the books that are found are sorted and checked for condition, if they pass, they go on the shelves. In fact, everything in the library was also rescued including the bookshelves and the artwork that adorns the walls…
Today, the library has over 6,000 books that range from fiction to nonfiction and there’s a very popular children’s section that even has a collection of comic books. An entire section is devoted to scientific research and there are also books available in English and French…
The full story at: “Turkish Garbage Collectors Open a Library from Books Rescued from the Trash“
* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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As we check it out, we might spare a thought for James Billington; he died on this date in 2018. A historian at Harvard and Princeton, who went on to hold the directorship of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Billington is probably best remembered for his final post, Librarian of Congress, a position he held from 1987 to 2015.
The Library of Congress, the oldest federal cultural institution in the U.S., is the nation’s de facto national library. As librarian, Billington oversaw that resource and appointed the U.S. poet laureate and awarded the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song each year. Billington undertook during his tenure to broaden and deepen public access to the LoC’s remarkable holdings, introducing a series of no-fee access services.
As Librarian, he also oversaw the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In 2010, Billington’s decision to open new DMCA loopholes resulted in his being described as “the most important person you never heard of.”
“The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages”*…
“When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions,” says Bogre Udell. “Would Cervantes have written the same stories had he been forced to write in a language other than Spanish? Would the music of Beyoncé be the same in a language other than English?”
Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century…
Every two weeks a language dies: Wikitongues wants to save them: “The Race to Save the World’s Disappearing Languages.”
And for a more in depth– and fascinating– discussion of the subject, listen to Mary Kay Magistad‘s conversation with Laura Welcher, the director of the Rosetta Project at The Long Now Foundation: “Why half the world’s languages may disappear in this century.”
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As we contemplate conserving the capacity to converse, we might spare a thought for Archibald MacLeish; he died on this date in 1982. A poet, dramatist, writer, and lawyer, he is probably best remembered for his poem “Ars Poetica” and his play JB. But MacLeish also served, from 1939 to 1944 as Librarian of Congress, where he oversaw the modernization of the institution and helped promote The Library– and libraries, the arts, and culture more generally– in public opinion. Over his career, he won three Pulitzer Prizes, a Bollingen Prize, a National Book Award, a Tony Award (for JB), was named a Commandeur de la Legion d’honneur, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers; a librarian can bring you back the right one”*
Recently some folks at the New York Public Library discovered a box containing old reference questions from the 1940s to the 1980s. They’re posting the questions to their Instagram account each Monday, noting that “we were Google before Google existed.” Some of the examples include answers; others are… well, probably unanswerable– but all are a reminder of the extraordinary value of the Library and its reference librarians.
People still use an updated version of the service, Ask NYPL; the Library reports that they receive about 1,700 reference questions a month via chat, email, and phone.
Read more at “Before Google, Here’s What New Yorkers Asked The NYPL.”
* Neil Gaiman
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As we keep it down, we might send bibliographic birthday greetings to Archibald MacLeish; he was born on this date in 1892. A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (Conquistador) and dramatist (JB), MacLeish became “America’s Reference Librarian”– the Librarian of Congress– in 1939.
Who (really) said that?…
The three types of misattributed statement: an analysis…
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As we quote with care, we might send learned birthday greetings to Daniel Joseph Boorstin; he was born on this date in 1914. As a Rhodes Scholar, Boorstin took first-class honors in jurisprudence at Oxford and was admitted as a barrister to the Inner Temple in 1937. Two years later, he returned to the US to teach history, first at Harvard, then at the University of Chicago. He left Chicago in 1969 to become the director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution; then, in 1975 moved on to become the Librarian of Congress, a post he held until 1987. He’s probably best-known for his three-volume history, The Americans, the third volume of which, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.
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