Library of Congress Mail Exhibit

August 9th, 2010

A good chunk of my time for the last several weeks has been putting together a 10 frame (160 page) philatelic exhibit on the Library of Congress and its mail which I call "America's Library - The Library of Congress". The exhibit will be displayed at the American Philatelic Society's StampShow 2010 in Richmond, Virginia on August 12-15. This is the largest stamp show in the United States. I've been exhibiting various aspects of my postal librariana collection at national level stamp shows since 2003. My most recent exhibits have been a ten frame exhibit entitled "America's Public Libraries and Their Forerunners", a six frame exhibit entitled "America's Presidential Libraries and Museums", a four frame exhibit entitled "America's Libraries - The Stamp", and a three frame exhibit entitled "America's Philatelic Libraries and Museums". I've been planning the Library of Congress exhibit for some time and this year I finally got around to doing it. The exhibit begins with a "Historical Overview", continues with "Library Mail", moves on to "Copyright and the Library of Congress", continues with "Library Services", then comes "Library Collections", followed by the "1982 Stamp", and concludes with "Bicentennial Celebration". There are close to 300 postal and other paper artifacts in the exhibit ranging from an 1814 postal wrapper with a notation "particulars of burning of Washington by British" to souvenir first day covers from the Library's bicentennial. From both a library history and postal history perspective the most meaningful aspect of the exhibit are the large number of examples of outgoing and incoming library mail over the history of the Library especially after 1870. One interesting aspect of incoming Library of Congress mail after 1901 is the required date stamping of all mail. A Mail & Delivery Division sorted and delivered all mail. At one point there were as many as five deliveries a day. Some examples of the date received hand stamps are shown above. If you're in the Richmond area later this week, drop in and take a look.

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Special Information at LC in WW2

August 3rd, 2010

The Division for Special Information was established in the Library of Congress in the summer of 1941 for the purpose of analyzing information and data bearing on national security. This meant obtaining and analyzing documents and publications originating in hostile nations. Neutral nations such as Ireland assisted the Library of Congress in obtaining some of these publications. The Library of Congress worked closely with the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, in this endeavor. The Division of Special Information grew to include 208 employees. In 1943 the unit moved from the Library of Congress to the Office of Strategic Services. Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish was an active player in the U.S. World War II effort as it related to information and served as Chairman of the Committee on Defense Information. In one of those odd ironies as it relates to freedom and defense, the United States Post Office ruthlessly destroyed tons of books, periodicals, and other documents coming into this country from adversarial nations during World War II. This resulted in libraries in the United States including the Library of Congress losing access to a significant aspect of the information record for that period. This interesting story is discussed at length in the book The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War by Brett Gary (Columbia University Press, 1999). The Library of Congress also has an interesting online exhibit Freedom's Fortress about the Library of Congress during World War II. The envelope above was mailed from Ireland in June of 1942 and includes censor marks from both Ireland (on the reverse) and the U.S.

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BP and search engines

July 28th, 2010

For the last couple of months, if you search Google and put in words like oil spill or gulf oil spill, at the top of the results list, you will get an ad from BP with the title BP Response. In it, BP gives you their side of the story about the oil disaster in the gulf and how they are responding to it. Unless you look carefully, it is easy to confuse the BP ad with the Google search results.

It is common on search engines that ads respond to your search terms, but this is the first time that I can remember that not only is the ad appearing, but where on the results page it appears is always the same. The real estate of web pages matter. By always placing the ad between the search box and the results list, it can blur the line between ads and search results.

There have been articles in the news about this and sites discussing the ethics of this. And according to some articles, BP has done the same on Yahoo and Bing.

My guess is that this case will be studied for years in business schools and how BP has used search engines to put out their message is an important part of their public relations strategy. There is nothing wrong with ads, of course. Google is able to digitize some amazing things because of their ad income. But we as search engine users need to be aware of how information can be influenced by things like the placement of ads on a results page. And as a librarian, I have to point out the obvious: library databases don’t have ads and so how their results display cannot be influenced like this.

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New York’s Library Week

July 27th, 2010

In 1890 the New York Library Association (NYLA) was established as the first statewide library association in the United States making this year its 120th anniversary. Melvil Dewey played a significant role in the establishment of the NYLA. He also was involved in the creation of New York's Library Week in 1899. Library Week in New York was not created to promote libraries, it was an expanded library conference that included recreation as well as library continuing education. Library Week was initially hosted annually at Dewey's Lake Placid Club in the Adirondacks where attendees could take advantage of the offerings of the resort. It was during Library Week in 1903 that NYLA member Henry M. Leipziger by chance came across a publication of the Lake Placid Club that stated "No one shall be received as member or guest, against whom there is physical, moral, social or race objection." The publication further stated "It is found impracticable to make exceptions to Jews or others excluded, even when of unusual personal qualifications." Leipsizer, a Jew, was outraged and initiated events that ultimately led to Dewey's resignation from his various responsibilities at the New York State Board of Regents including serving as State Librarian. Library Week was hosted at the Lake Placid Club again in 1920 but a controversy relating to Dewey's relationship with women caused a rejection of an offer to hold Library Week in Lake Placid in 1924.

The poster stamp or "cinderella" above was created to promote New York Library Week in 1917 which took place at the Lakewood Farm Inn at Roscoe, New York. NYLA President Edward F. Stevens wrote about the meeting: "Notwithstanding the critical times and the engrossing concerns of country and of an abnormal daily life, the spirit manifest in the membership of the association promises a conference comparable in interest, enthusiasm and attendance to the best Library Week the association has known." Controversy involving the NYLA and Lake Placid arose again over a decision to hold the NYLA Conference in 1969 at Lake Placid.

Wayne A. Wiegand's book about Melvil Dewey Irrepressible Reformer (American Library Association, 1996) provides extensive coverage about Dewey and the Lake Placid Club. Previous blog posts about Dewey and Lake Placid are located HERE and HERE.

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Travels of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

July 24th, 2010

On December 26, 1941, America's most important documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were transported under armed escort from the Library of Congress in special containers to Union Station in Washington, D. C.. They were then loaded onto a west bound Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Pullman sleeper and were escorted on their journey by Secret Service agents and Chief Assistant Librarian of Congress Verner W. Clapp. At 10:30 a.m. on the morning of December 27, the documents and their escorts were met at the train station by more agents and Army troops and were taken in an Army truck to the Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution remained at Fort Knox until the Fall of 1944 when they were returned to the Library of Congress. All of this took place, of course, in the context of World War II. The two documents had taken an earlier trip on September 30, 1921 from the Department of State to the Library of Congress. That trip took place in the Library's Model-T Ford truck which was driven by Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam. On February 28, 1924 after a dedication that included President and Mrs. Coolidge, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution went on display in a specially designed case referred to as a "sort of shrine". The shrine is shown in the postcard above. In a final journey on December 13, 1952, the two documents were transferred to the National Archives, where they reside today, accompanied by tanks, motorcycles, military bands, color guard, and servicemen brandishing submachine guns. This interesting story was found in the Encyclopedia of the Library of Congress (Library of Congress, 2004) edited by John Y. Cole and Jane Aikin.