The Library of Congress
Stereoscopic image of the Library of Congress, handily downloaded from the Library of Congress!
You know who owns the Library of Congress? YOU DO!
And guess what—a huge pile of imagery, artwork, and historical documentation from that library has been lovingly digitized and made available to you whenever you want to access it…because it’s YOURS! And mine. And isn’t that lovely?! I am not in the mood to wax on and on philosophically about this right now, my aim is to send you off on a wonderful tangent, down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. You can start HERE.
Are you a photographer or a lover of photography? You can go bonkers in here. You can rifle through the images submitted for the FSA project by Dorothea Lange (yes, Migrant Mother is there and is downloadable, you own that one, too), Gordon Parks, and Walker Evans. You can get lost in the images taken by Lewis Hine that documented child laborers and effectively swung popular opinion enough to change the laws and practices around making 10-year-olds work in factories.
Manuel, the young Shrimp-Picker by Lewis Hine
Dorothea Lange: Japanese relocation, California. Maye Noma, behind the plate, and Tomi Nagao, at bat, in a practice game between members of the Chick-a-dee softball team, which was kept intact when the players were evacuated from Los Angeles to Manzanar, California, a War Relocation Authority Center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry digital file from original neg.
Maybe you want to learn about the history of music notation?
Crikey! They scanned this WHOLE book! 700 pages! Just in case…
There’s a whole section of Historic American Newspapers that you can search by events and zoom in on and read.
You can play around in the “NATIONAL JUKEBOX” and hear Guido Gialdini whistling the Ciribiribin Waltz, or rifle around in the “Blues” area of the music archive, and delight in downloading a very crackly version of Bessie Smith singing “Cemetery Blues” with Jimmy Jones at the piano. :)
I don’t feel a need to belabor it.
My work here is done if just one of you is already headed down this rabbit hole to dig through the best digital basement-full-of-fun-things-to-find. It’s been several years since I found out I had this treasure trove at my fingertips and that a fair amount of it is DOWNLOADABLE, and it still amazes me and brings me joy when I wander its virtual halls.
Lastly, don’t you love your LOCAL library, too?!
Give them some love if you do because sharing, especially sharing knowledge and resources, does not seem to come naturally to our culture of late. Libraries are a wonderful measure of things we do right, even when they are holding documentation of things we’ve done wrong.
Now, I am off to plumb the depths of the 3000+ images in the Frances Benjamin-Johnston archive of cyanotype images that I just stumbled upon. ;-)
xxHL
