LibrariYan @ Congress: A Photo Narrative

On Monday I popped over to the Library of Congress for their open house event.  And it was awesome.  Allow me to illustrate:

Beautiful building. Beautiful day.
Street parking available thanks to a federal holiday.

A rare opportunity for regular folks to enter the reading room.

Boom.  Reading Room ceiling.
Stupid Blogger keeps turning this image vertical.

Miles of card catalog...
No new cards entered since 1980.

Card catalog glamour shot.  It exists.

You know I went to the drawers for "Library Science."
Whaddup, Jersey? Newark represent!

Gratuitous card catalog shot.

Young Readers Center display noting books
from/about various places throughout the US.

LOC 2012 Notable Books.
I took a copy of each list and will write about them later.

YA section.  The collection is made up primarily of donations.
You want your book at the LOC? Donate a copy. Boom!

Recommended reads from local teens.
Clearly, they talked to my students.

No photo narrative would be complete without Harry Potter in various languages.
I meant to photograph the braille books, but my camera insisted on this.

While I was there I also saw the Lincoln Bible (it's tiny and red with gold edges), on which both Lincoln and Obama swore their oaths of office, Lincoln's handwritten first inaugural address and a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation (no photos allowed, womp womp).  A Gutenberg Bible was there too! (I saw a bunch of these in London, so I wasn't as impressed).  And there's a cool Bob Hope/political satire exhibit!

And the staff and volunteers at the Young Readers Center were just the bees knees.  Friendly, knowledgeable and happy to chat.  That's my kind of librarians.

The one thing I didn't get to do was get a library card.  And that was because the office (across the street) for that was closed.  Guess I'll just have to make another trip.  

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