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 The Library of Congress Experience Behold the modern library experience. The recently renewed Library of Congress includes a bunch of exciting new interactive technologies, courtesy of Microsoft. These exhibitions make the Library of Congress and its collections more dynamic and accessible than ever. Touch-screen kiosks with the power to magnify images of objects, translate text and point to other sources of information are found throughout the library’s exhibition spaces. Visitors can flip through century-old books, magnify sections of interest and access commentary from the Library’s top experts, all from the same touch screen. This enables visitors to immerse themselves in the mind’s of America’s most revered thinkers. Artifacts like the Waldseemüller map (the first map which includes the name “America”), the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, the Gutenberg Bible and original volumes from Thomas Jefferson’s Library are virtually at your fingertips. This is the modern way of “going to the library!”  One way to treat history in an exhibition is to lay out events and surviving objects and explain their importance: the past is prelude to the present, and we are its heirs. Since the library is, in its very essence, a repository of books and manuscripts, this approach is fundamental. But it demands unusual attentiveness from the visitor.
Another approach is to show that every product of that immutable past was once something contingent, coming into existence because of choices made. A historical document may appear unchanging, but when it was written, it was growing out of a process of revision and debate. In this light history is seen as lived experience.
(nytimes)References: creatingexcellence.blogspot, nytimes 1 Comment: on Interactive History Lessons |
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