ALA Conference 6/22

Now the big conference starts!
I'm just going to give you the main highlight of my day. Cindy Pavelka joined me and we took a tour of the Library of Congress.
The tour was a Shakespeare-themed walking tour of the historic Thomas Jefferson building, which is the older building most of you see in pictures of the Library of Congress. John Cole lead the tour, he is the director of the Library's Center for the Book. Honestly, this was an amazing couple of hours. We saw their Shakespeare display of primarily 19th century materials that referenced Shakespeare. For example, a paper written by an famous actor 5 days after Lincoln's assassination. The paper was a list of quotes from Macbeth that the actor felt spoke to the "death of a king." And Cole Porter's original sketches of early "Kiss me Kate" versions. The most inspiring was a tour of the building pointing out all the Shakespeare quotes, statues and references. Interestingly the building was completed by the army corps of engineers and they used many different artists who were involved in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. So, Eric, how cool is that connection??? : )
And, I admit I got a little teary when we went to the gallery and were able to look into the main reading room. Wow. It really takes your breath away. I've included a picture. I highly recommend that everyone stops at the Library of Congress if you are in DC. Later we saw original manuscripts in the Manuscript Division Office (they had a special showing). An original letter from Roosevelt to his children, letter from Thomas Jefferson talking about slavery, Abraham Lincoln's original "sum" book from grade school. Again, Wow! Our last stop was at the office handling oral histories of Veterans, an interesting project hoping to capture as much oral history from vets from every war. So they are teaching the public methods to record these to help build their archives. This was the same building as the Copyright Office. Really amazing buildings and collections.
Wonderful day!