{"id":397,"date":"2012-11-28T20:05:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-28T20:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/2012\/11\/28\/folk-songs-and-light-bulbs\/"},"modified":"2018-07-18T21:29:22","modified_gmt":"2018-07-18T21:29:22","slug":"folk-songs-and-light-bulbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/2012\/11\/28\/folk-songs-and-light-bulbs\/","title":{"rendered":"Folk Songs and Light Bulbs"},"content":{"rendered":"<table align=\"center\" cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" style=\"margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;text-align: center\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-j7fGFTgJdgs\/ULZt8L15THI\/AAAAAAAAAKI\/Yne7ezjPgxU\/s1600\/1204px-Library_of_Congress_Great_Hall_-_Jan_2006.jpg\" style=\"margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"340\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-j7fGFTgJdgs\/ULZt8L15THI\/AAAAAAAAAKI\/Yne7ezjPgxU\/s400\/1204px-Library_of_Congress_Great_Hall_-_Jan_2006.jpg\" width=\"400\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"text-align: center\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Library_of_Congress_Great_Hall_-_Jan_2006.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Wikipedia<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>Let me just preface this post by saying: I am not a librarian &#8212; at least not in any technical sense. I never went to school&#8230; never even thought about going to school&#8230; actually, before I started working here, I&#8217;m not sure I even knew there was such a thing as a degree in library science. I just hung around a lot of libraries, used them a lot, read in them a lot, napped in them more than a few times before class, so when I started working here as a student it&nbsp;fit naturally. But possibly because I never <i>studied <\/i>libraries or the science <i>of <\/i>them, never really considered them in anything resembling a holistic, or comprehensive way, I still, even after a few years working here, find myself astounded at some of the things I find from time to time, usually by accident, doing this or that at work.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll share just a few quick examples:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The<span><\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/\"> Library of Congress website<span><\/span><\/a>: If you&#8217;ve ever been to Washington (and this being Baltimore, there is a pretty good chance that you have) more than likely someone &#8212; a tour guide, a cab driver, a cousin &#8212; pointed this building out to you. It gorgeous (see above). The library does exactly what it says it does: it&#8217;s the library for congress. So unless you&#8217;re a representative or senator, or an aid to one or the other, you can&#8217;t actually check books out of the building. But, there is enough on their website to keep even the mildly curious happy for a while. A few suggestions:&nbsp;<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.loc.gov\/folklife\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">The American Folklife Center<\/a>: Here you&#8217;ll find digital transfers of wax recordings made around the country in the 1930&#8217;s and 40&#8217;s (folk songs, sea shanties, field hollers, Native American rituals, etc.), as well as pictures and maps of historical America.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/memory.loc.gov\/ammem\/bellhtml\/bellhome.html\" target=\"_blank\">Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers<\/a>: This site doesn&#8217;t have quite as much info, but what it does have I think is pretty interesting: scans of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Alexander_Graham_Bell\" target=\"_blank\">Alexander Graham Bell&#8217;<\/a>s journal (containing many preliminary drawings for future inventions), and letters to and from him and his family (<a href=\"http:\/\/memory.loc.gov\/ammem\/bellhtml\/004038.html\" target=\"_blank\">including one from Mark Twain<\/a>, where he (jokingly) berates Bell&#8217;s father-in-law for telephone service that always seems  to cut out when he&#8217;s practicing his cursing). <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Wikipedia Let me just preface this post by saying: I am not a librarian &#8212; at least not in any technical sense. I never went to school&#8230; never even thought about going to school&#8230; actually, before I started working <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/2012\/11\/28\/folk-songs-and-light-bulbs\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Folk Songs and Light Bulbs<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1227,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[342,192,345,464,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1273,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397\/revisions\/1273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}