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Throughout his life, books were vital to Thomas Jefferson's education and well-being. When his family home Shadwell burned in 1770 Jefferson most lamented the loss of his books. In the midst of the American Revolution and while United States minister to France in the 1780s, Jefferson acquired thousands of books for his library at Monticello. Jefferson's library went through several stages, but it was always critically important to him. Books provided the little traveled Jefferson with a broader knowledge of the contemporary and ancient worlds than most contemporaries of broader personal experience. By 1814 when the British burned the nation's Capitol and the Library of Congress, Jefferson had acquired the largest personal collection of books in the United States. Jefferson offered to sell his library to Congress as a replacement for the collection destroyed by the British during the War of 1812. Congress purchased Jefferson's library for $23,950 in 1815. A second fire on Christmas Eve of 1851, destroyed nearly two thirds of the 6,487 volumes Congress had purchased from Jefferson.
Through a generous grant from Jerry and Gene Jones, the Library of Congress is attempting to reassemble Jefferson's library as it was sold to Congress. Although the broad scope of Jefferson's library was a cause for criticism of the purchase, Jefferson extolled the virtue of its broad sweep and established the principle of acquisition for the Library of Congress: “there is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.” Proclaiming that “I cannot live without books,” Jefferson began a second collection of several thousand books, which was sold at auction in 1829 to help satisfy his creditors.
Did you know that these recorders put sound as magnetic impulses on wire? I had never heard of such a thing. The wire recordings are relatively stable, and the wire media were available for field recording before magnetic tape was feasible.
A rendering of my final Library of Congress-inspired Ornament for the White House 3D Printed Ornament Challenge.
www.instructables.com/id/Library-of-Congress-3D-Printed-C...
The image on the left is by Carol M. Highsmith and in the Public Domain.
Instructions on modeling the ornament (and downloadable STL file) is in Instructables.
The ornament can also be printed at Shapeways
www.shapeways.com/model/2841623/library-of-congress-chris...
View my blog at tgaw.wordpress.com
IRENE, a system from Lawrence Berkeley Labs, optically captures record grooves and converts that into audio form. It's not perfect, but it's useful, as no contact is required. This version uses 2D captures; a 3D system that should more accurately extract audio is in the works.
Some music was only ever released in cassette form. This box contains a set of ethnic music being digitized (up to six cassettes can be captured simultaneously at real-time speeds) for a project.
This device allows recording onto a lacquer disk, a common system used for decades for reasonably stable audio capture.
This 200-seat theater with an organ that rises from the floor regularly screens well-known and rarely-seen movies from the Library of Congress's collection. The theater can project film (including a safe method for projecting nitrate film base) and video in many forms, including digital.
The Binghamton is a retired ferryboat that operated from 1905 to 1967 transporting passengers across the Hudson River between Manhattan and Hoboken. She was built for the Hoboken Ferry Company of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad and was designed to carry 986 passengers plus vehicles.[5] Binghamton has been permanently moored at Edgewater, Bergen County, New Jersey, United States, since 1971. The US Department of the Interior added her to the National Register of Historic Places on July 9, 1982. Operated as a floating restaurant from 1975 to 2007, the vessel is now closed and awaiting demolition.[6] The Binghamton is significant as possibly the last surviving steam ferry still afloat built to serve New York Harbor, the birthplace of commercial steam navigation, the birthplace of the double-ended steam ferry, and an area whose development was profoundly shaped by the introduction of vessels of this kind.
This is in a room filled with an example of nearly every input and recording method over the entire history of fixing sound into a physical medium.
Enhanced photo from the Flickr Faces of the Civil War collection from the Library of Congress. See the original at www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/5228564551/in/a... Since the original file size is quadrupled, you can click on this shot for more detail.
Material that doesn't need perfect archival condition is stored in racks in the main building as it works its way through repair or digitization.
Paul Marie Verlaine, Parallèlement, lithographs by Pierre Bonnard. Paris, A. Vollard, 1900 – from the collection of the Library of Congress