Timeless treasures and contemporary presentations from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. As the world’s preeminent reservoir of knowledge, we are the steward of millions of recordings dating from the earliest Edison films to the present.

This is a wonderful resource that is now so easy to access!

There are videos of talks by well-known authors at the 2008 National Book Festival, such as this one of Jon Scieszka:

There are also fascinating clips of early film from the Edison and Westinghouse laboratories:

And the Journeys and Crossings playlist, which “[brings] to life some of the Library’s most exciting and historically significant materials through the personal insights of the staff who know them best.”

Have fun sifting through all of these fabulous treasures!

The Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney have now added about 500 images each.

This week the Smithsonian Institution has added about 800 images from its collection.

These collections are fabulous resources for projects and presentations. The images can be easily downloaded and carry “no known copyright restrictions.”

As with the Library of Congress photos, all of the images in The Commons are open for comments and tagging by Flickr users.

Image citation: Portrait of Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), Engineer. Uploaded on May 30, 2008 by Smithsonian Institution. No known copyright restrictions.