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Good afternoon. This announcement is being sent to a number of lists. Please accept our apologies for any duplications. Collaborative Online Collection Celebrating Presidential Inaugurations Now Available on American Memory The Library of Congress has made available at its American Memory Web site an online collection of selected materials to celebrate the inaugurations of the presidents of the United States. “I Do Solemnly Swear . . .”: Presidential Inaugurations consists of approximately four hundred items from each of sixty-two inaugurations, from George Washington’s in 1789 to William Jefferson Clinton’s in 1997, and will include items relating to the sixty-third inauguration of 2001. A key objective of this online presentation is to make accessible to the public, before the inauguration of the next president, many of the treasures and other important primary-source materials held by the Library of Congress as well as by other institutions. The collection has been organized chronologically by presidential inauguration and an effort has been made to offer a balanced number of items for each inaugural event. It is produced by the National Digital Library Program and contains material primarily from legislative and executive branch agencies with additional items from other collection sources. The website can be accessed at the following url: <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/pihtml/> Presidential inaugurations in the United States represent the transfer of power from the people to a new or re-elected president and are marked with all the gravity and solemnity appropriate to such a momentous occasion. The ceremonies surrounding the investiture of a president take place regardless of weather conditions and are accompanied by grand or modest celebrations as warranted by circumstances--the specter of war, ill health of a president, or a president’s wishes. In times of tragedy, at the death of a president, an inauguration becomes a muted occasion, a simple swearing-in ceremony, when a vice president assumes the presidency. Behind the panoply of public display, there is the intimate, human side of every inauguration– the president's inaugural address to be drafted, letters to be written, and thoughts to be entered into diaries–all of which enrich our understanding of a president and his inauguration. The private, “behind-the-scenes” nature of manuscript materials, in particular, provides a different perspective to such a grand and important event and allows us to contemplate it in another dimension, the private realm. This collection includes selections from diaries and letters of presidents and of those who witnessed inaugurations, handwritten drafts of inaugural addresses, broadsides, inaugural tickets and programs, prints, photographs, and sheet music. The selections are drawn from the Presidential Papers in the Manuscript Division, as well as from the collections of the Prints and Photographs Division, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Music Division, and the General Collections of the Library of Congress. Additional original material has been included from the photography collections of the Architect of the Capitol and the United States Senate Office of the Sergeant at Arms. Links are provided to images or documents in the online collections of the Presidential Libraries (administered by the National Archives and Records Administration--NARA) and the White House. It is expected that numerous related inaugural Web sites will link to this Library of Congress site, among them those of the Smithsonian Institution, the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York. Some items in this presentation–from records of early sessions of Congress to early films of Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt–are already online in American Memory. An important component is a collaboration with the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School, which permits the site to offer Yale’s online presentations of the inaugural addresses from Presidents Washington to Bush with associated searchable text transcriptions. Special presentations and noteworthy Web sites related to this collection include: The essay “Presidential Inaugurations–Words and Images” offers examples of contemporaneous pairings in which a recounting of an inaugural event in a diary or letter corresponds to an image of the same event. These matched words and images were felicitous discoveries among the numerous selections for the Presidential Inaugurations Web site. “Bibles and Scripture Passages used by Presidents in taking the Oath of Office,” “Presidential Oaths of Office,” and “Inaugurals of Presidents of the United States: Some Precedents and Notable Events”–three reference lists compiled by the Office of the Curator in the Architect of the Capitol–present historical facts such as the dates and locations of each presidential inauguration and the chief justices or other officials who presided. They also provide details about inaugural “firsts” such as the shortest and longest inaugural addresses (George Washington, 1793; William Henry Harrison, 1841); the first vice president to assume the presidency at the death of a president (Tyler, 1841); the first inaugural to be covered by telegraph (Polk, 1845); or the first time an automobile was used in an inauguration (Harding, 1921). A forthcoming video presentation by Manuscript Specialist Dr. Marvin Kranz, curator of Presidential Inaugurations, focuses on selected items in the online presentation. A Library of Congress publication compiled by Ruth Freitag, Presidential Inaugurations: A Selected List of References, a major bibliography of presidential inaugural sources, is presented online for the first time with fully-indexed, searchable citations. A link to the Web site of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (Senate Committee on Rules and Administration) provides a history of the committee and its role in organizing the inaugural ceremonies. This site will feature a live broadcast of the presidential inauguration of 2001. “I Do Solemnly Swear . . .”: Presidential Inaugurations will be added to more than eighty collections already freely available from American Memory, a project of the National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress. By the end of 2000, the conclusion of the Library's 200th year, the program will bring more than five million items of American history to citizens everywhere through the Internet. Please direct any questions to ndlpcoll@loc.gov =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-= All postings to LM_NET are protected under copyright law. To quit LM_NET (or set-reset NOMAIL or DIGEST), send email to: listserv@listserv.syr.edu In the message write EITHER: 1) SIGNOFF LM_NET 2) SET LM_NET NOMAIL or 3) SET LM_NET DIGEST 4) SET LM_NET MAIL * Please allow for confirmation from Listserv. For LM_NET Help see: http://ericir.syr.edu/lm_net/ Archives: http://askeric.org/Virtual/Listserv_Archives/LM_NET.html See also EL-Announce for announcements from library media vendors: http://www.mindspring.com/~el-announce/ =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=