Today I caught the train out to Worcester, some fifty miles west of Boston, to visit the American Antiquarian Society. This is another long-established and world-renowned collection of early American material, with enormously extensive and broad holdings of particularly early printed materials, although they also have significant collections of manuscripts, particularly relating to New England. Their Librarian, Tom Knoles met me and began by giving me a fantastic tour of their building, introducing me to various staff members on the way. They have a beautiful reading room and extensive stacks - all their material is kept onsite and can therefore be fetched very quickly. He explained that they are about to implement an automated system for stack requests, but are still working manually at the moment. When the new system comes in, readers will be able to place requests from offsite for the first time, but they still won't actually fetch material until the reader arrives at the library. It sounds as if they are still expecting the new system to be very staff-mediated, and overall I got the impression that they take a lot of care to support readers in using and accessing their collections - all new readers are given an orientation when they arrive and they are very keen on having senior staff working on the desk to make themselves more available to researchers. This is particularly important as so much of their collection is not catalogued. They are obviously working hard to get material catalogued but with such a huge backlog (the library existed for a very long time before anyone even began a card catalogue), it's going to take a huge amount of time to do that. However, the way the collections are arranged, the staff are able to find uncatalogued material for readers, and they stress that if it's American and pre-1877 there's a strong likelihood they'll have it and it's worth asking them to check.

Tom gave me a tour round the stacks as well - they've extended their building several times to accommodate their growing collection and do still have quite a bit of growth space. As with many of the other places I've visited, this really gave me a good idea of their holdings. They organise them by format or type of material, and they really have huge collections of all sorts of things - they are known for their newspaper holdings, which are amazing, but they have huge collections of broadsides, pamphlets, other periodicals, maps, prints and other graphic collections, ephemera, children's literature and even sheet music! We dropped in on their newspaper curator who showed me their dedicated newspaper catalogue, Clarence, which provides detailed information down to the issue level of their newspaper holdings - they estimate that they have some 2 million or so issues and about 1.6 million of them are now included in this database.

We also stopped by their conservation area for a chat about how they look after their materials, as well as taking a look at the impressively industrial looking digitisation area. The American Antiquarian Society has worked for years with commercial vendors such as Readex to make their materials more widely available, first as microcards and microfilms and now as digital resources (this is of course where an enormous amount of the source material for Evans and Early American Newspapers originally came from). EBSCO are currently in residence working on a huge digitisation project going through their periodical holdings, and they have also worked with Alexander Street Press, contributing material to their letters and diaries databases. It was interesting to learn more about this over lunch with Tom and a couple of other staff members. The AAS is a private institution and had a long history of partnering with microfilm vendors, which meant for them that the decision to continue those kind of commercial arrangements into the digital environment made sense, and it does bring them in a not inconsiderable amount of revenue that they can use to continue building up their collections. They also get access to the databases themselves, as contributing partners, which they view very much as tools to help researchers navigate their physical collections too. They also have been careful to retain ownership of the digitised images, which after a certain period of time they will be able to use themselves. This is not to say though that they are not carrying out any digitisation themselves - they have also undertaken quite a bit of the same kind of projects as many other institutions, digitising parts of their collections and making those available on their website. Lauren Hewes, who is their graphic collections curator and who also came to lunch, walked me through their website in more detail in the afternoon, showing me how to find a lot of this digitised material which I hadn't found myself - a lot of it is quite hidden away, but they are building links into their catalogue and looking at ways to make finding their freely available digitised material easier. They also have very extensive collection guides and finding aids which again mitigate their cataloguing backlog. She also showed me their digital assets site, which is not yet fully available (in that it's a bit hidden away and not fully linked to anywhere), but which you can access if you have the URL (which I now do!). This is a digital archive of all their images, including the ones that were created by vendors which they are now free to use themselves, and already contains thousands of images of documents and graphics. They are still working on the metadata and there are some rudimentary subject headings for browsing, but they don't really see this as a search tool, rather as an archive which will be (and already is, in some cases) linked to from their online catalogue. I obviously knew about the AAS's extensive work with the likes of Readex, but wasn't fully aware of what else they are doing in this area. They do hope eventually to have everything digitised in one way or another, and because of the way they are working with commercial partners this does seem more achievable than it might otherwise appear. Whether we'll be able to afford to access it from Oxford is quite another question though!

I've jumped ahead in the time a little, but on the way back from lunch, Paul Erickson, their Director of Academic Programmes, showed me their fellows' house and told me a bit about their fellowship programme. They would be keen to get more UK graduates applying, so I'll definitely be passing on that information to our readers too.

My library visits resumed this morning with a trip to the John F Kennedy Presidential Library, which has a fabulous location overlooking the water on the University of Massachusetts campus. It was rather a misty and dull morning, so the views were not as impressive as I imagine they often can be, but it really is a beautifully designed building. I first met with Stephen Plotkin, the reference archivist, who took me up to the reading room and talked to me about their collections (again it was particularly interesting to learn about the collections they have that aren't what you'd expect, such as Ernest Hemingway's papers) and their online finding aids. They have pretty extensive finding aids available online, which go along with their extensive online collections - the Kennedy Library made a big splash earlier in the summer with their launch of their very ambitious digital collections, which I talked further about with Erica Boudreau who looks after this aspect of the library's work. They have been systematically digitising since 2007 and had some 350,000 documents and images available at launch, growing at an estimated 2000 items each week. They are the only Presidential Library, and really the only part of the National Archives, engaged in such an extensive and systematic programme, although as I learnt on Monday, the Roosevelt Library is also now starting a massive project of their own. I was interesting to hear both Stephen and Erica's takes on the benefits and reservations surrounding the work. They are fortunate to have had a lot of funding and sponsorship which has enabled them to take this project on, which is of course the main stumbling block most other institutions have cited for being unable to do as much in the way of digitisation as they may have liked. Erica explained that they don't see their digitisation as an extra project, but rather as a part of what they do and integral to how they operate, and eventually hope to make their way right through their collections. I was interested to learn more about the decision-making process behind the order of priority for scanning - obviously they began with the no-brainers and the popular collections, but when you're working through so much material, how do you decide what to do when? They are digitising in a way that really reflects the archival organisation of the documents - folders, collections and series of collections are digitised together, and you navigate through the online environment in much the same way as you would the physical one. It's hugely ambitious, and a different approach to many of the other institutions I have visited, so it'll be interesting to see over the coming years whether this becomes a model that is taken up elsewhere (and attracts funding), or whether it will remain such a unique approach for this kind of institution.

I was also able to pick Stephen's brain on a few other aspects of the library and the Presidential Libraries system as a whole, which, along with my conversations with Nancy Smith at NARA and with the staff at the Roosevelt Library, have really given me a much better appreciation of the system as a whole and the context in which they operate. They are, as I was told by everyone I met, a unique public-private partnership with two distinct and occasionally conflicting missions - on the one hand these institutions are charged with preserving and promoting the legacy of the President they are there to commemorate, but on the other they have an important role to play in contributing to the historical record. There was an article in the New York Times about this a couple of months ago with regard to the Nixon and Reagan libraries which caused a bit of a stir, so it has been interesting to hear the take on this subject from the various people I have met in the Presidential Library system. It is a system that seems very different and a little unintuitive from the outside, not just for the fact that the libraries and papers are so widely dispersed geographically, but for this very mix of history and what could veer dangerously close to hagiography.

In the afternoon I made my way to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which is a world-renowned and venerable institution dating back to the late 18th century. They are known for their extensive and very impressive collections relating to the Colonial, Revolutionary and Early Republic periods, but also have huge 19th century collections and even a lot of 20th century material. I was greeted by their librarian, Peter Drummey, who gave me a fascinating and informative tour of the building, culminating in a visit to the inner sanctum of the stacks where some of their most special special collections are kept, including the Adams and Jefferson papers. Peter brought out a selection of documents for me to see - they keep some of the real treasures in display drawers to have them readily available to show people - including letters from Adams, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt, and a beautifully illustrated diary from a girl in the 19th century talking about going to the circus to see elephants and a beluga whale. He also pulled out Jefferson's farm book and, most excitingly for a librarian, Jefferson's own library catalogue, with his description of his classification scheme in the front, and many careful checkmarks and erasures throughout. He was a thoroughly entertaining and informative guide to the history of the society and its collections, and it was a great start to my visit.

I then spent time talking to Tracy Potter, their reference librarian, and Elaine Grublin, who is Head of Reader Services, learning more about how they work to make their collections more accessible and the services they offer to researchers, both in person and from a distance. I was able to pick up various tidbits of information on a very practical level that is really useful to know. They also supplemented what I'd just learnt from Peter about the type and extent of their collections, especially some of the things they have which they are less obviously known for. Peter had explained that there are two types of state historical societies in the US - the older ones such as the MHS were generally privately established and as such don't hold public records, whereas a lot of the newer ones do have that more formal official role. I haven't been able to get to an example of that kind of library on this trip, but it would be interesting to visit one in the future and learn more to compare.

Tracy and Elaine also spoke to me a bit about the society's digitisation efforts, which I then learnt more about from Nancy Heywood, their Digital Projects Coordinator. They have been doing quite a lot of digitisation, both in the way of one-off, individual items for object of the month type posts and in more curated selections and collections. We had an interesting discussion about the findability of this kind of material, and usability of their site - at the moment you can find their digitised collections in a couple of places, which is not so intuitive, but they are working on a redesign which should improve things. I've offered to help provide some feedback when they do get the new site up and running, which will also prompt me to make sure I take a good look at it myself when it is ready. We also talked a little about their approach to and experiments with putting material outside their site - they do a bit of this at present, and are definitely thinking about ways to make their collections more visible in this kind of way. They already have a good twitter feed posting John Quincy Adams's 'line-by-line' diary day by day, and are actually doing some good work with that very collection in terms of creating links between the different versions of the diary so that you can compare entries in the short and longer versions by each day - the kind of thing that a digitised version allows you to do very easily but which are cumbersome to achieve in the microfilmed edition such as we have at the VHL. Many of e issues they face with this aspect of their work are much the same as most of the other institutions I've visited, and again highlighted just how unusual the approach of the Kennedy Library from earlier in the day is.

This morning I have been at Columbia University for a slightly different visit. One of my colleagues from Oxford, Alena Ptak-Danchak (who is our Keeper of Scientific Books) used to work at Columbia and coincidentally is also in New York right now. I had a morning that I hadn't yet managed to fill, so Alena offered to meet me and take me in to visit some of the libraries at Columbia. We began at the Oral History Center, which is a major draw for researchers coming here. They have about the most extensive oral history collections for American history, covering a huge range of projects from the Eisenhower administration to 9/11, and the center is very actively engaged in oral history projects, the fruits of which will eventually be made available in the library and also in some cases online. Charis Shafer gave me an excellent introduction to the work of the center and their collections, as well as a greater insight into some of the unique considerations of working with this kind of material - the importance of the release and consent forms, and how that governs what is available and the way that the changing nature of the Internet can end up making someone's data more publicly available than they initially agreed to. Digitising oral history really is largely done therefore for preservation, as they can't make the transcripts and audio available without the consent of the interviewee. Interestingly for some older material the audio even is no longer available at all, as it was considered unimportant in some cases once the transcripts had been created. Nevertheless they do have some collections online and available remotely where they have the permissions to do so. They also have an online portal which provides more information on the collections, finding aids, and access to those collections which are available online. Charis also walked me through the process by which the oral histories are collected and processed, which was very interesting to learn about. Some of this dovetailed nicely with what I learnt about the oral history collections at the Miller Center at the beginning of my trip. This is something I hadn't realised would be so useful about my trip, the way in which what I learn at one library gets reinforced or complemented by what I learn at another, and I'm getting a lot more of that 'big picture' than I thought I would.

Next we dropped in on the rare books and manuscripts reading room and had a chat with Eric Wakin, who is their Curator of American History and who gave me some more information about their special collections, as well as some of their digitisation projects (which are limited, largely for all the same reasons as all the other libraries I've discussed this with) and what he does to help students and researchers navigate their holdings. He's emailed me a useful looking document that he uses to provide this guidance, which will be a great reminder when I come to investigate this further back at home. He also pointed me on to another couple of people within the Columbia libraries who we then went on to drop in on and who also graciously spent some time talking to me - John Tofanelli who looks after Columbia's digital collections for US history (I can only desperately envy their budget and the e-resources that they have), and the Avery Library which houses the Architecture and Fine Arts collections - not somewhere I would have soon thought of in connection to US history but who have been doing some excellent digitisation work with some of their historic collections. Alena also gave me a tour round both the main library and the campus before she went to attend a lecture and I headed off to my afternoon appointment.

This afternoon I went up to Harlem to visit the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This is part of the New York Public Library system and is a high profile institution with amazing collections relating to 20th century African American history and culture. Diana Lachatanere (from the manuscript collections) and Mary Yearwood (from the print and photograph collections) talked to me about some of the collections that they have as well as giving me a tour around the building. They have done minimal digitisation, but are working hard to make their finding aids available online. A lot of their materials have been microfilmed in the past and are available that way though, and it was good to learn how extensive these are (but, sigh, more for the desiderata list...). In addition to the usual funding/resources issues, as their collections are mostly 20th century, they are also prevented from digitising a lot of their material due to copyright considerations. Like the Library of Congress, their collections are separated and consulted according to format, and are all held in closed stacks. The Schomburg Center also holds a lot of public events and has extensive exhibition space; curiously when you come in to the building, the library is really not very obvious at all, confined to the basement and upper floors, and it's the galleries that are visually more prominent. They don't just collect books, papers and photos though, but also have large fine arts and sculpture collections so do have this somewhat wider focus than just their library collections.

Today I caught the train up the very beautiful Hudson Valley to visit the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, just north of Poughkeepsie. The FDR Library is the oldest Presidential Library (although Hoover is the earliest chronologically) and really the whole Presidential Library system was begun by FDR with the establishment of his library. Unlike all the other Presidential Libraries though, this one was established while the President was still in office and so is the only Presidential Library that was actually used by a sitting President. It is located on the Roosevelt family estate on the banks of the Hudson, right by the house where FDR was born, grew up, and next to the rose garden in which he is buried. It's a glorious location, and the whole place is really steeped in the history of his life and his family.

I was looked after all day by Kirsten Carter and her colleague Sarah, who spent some time talking to me about all my areas of interest - the library, their digitisation projects and use of social media.

The Library is currently being renovated, for the first time since it opened in 1941 and so everything is in quite a state of upheaval. The reading room and stacks are all in temporary accommodation within the visitor centre, and about 10% of their collections are being housed offsite and are not currently available for consultation. However they are maintaining their services throughout the disruption, which looks set to continue until 2013.

They have just started on a massive project to digitise some 350,000 documents, which they hope to make available by next summer. Next to the massive project currently underway at the Kennedy Library, this is about the biggest digitisation project undertaken at a Presidential Library, and they are clearly very excited about it and its potential. They have already undertaken a number of smaller projects, depending on funding - the background considerations to their digitisation projects are much the same as with the other institutions I have visited. Also like many of these other institutions, they are also working very hard to get their finding aids available online too, to help users get more information about their collections and what they have available before they come to do research. They are also enthusiastic users of social media to promote the library's collections and engage with a more public audience. They have uploaded a huge amount of archival film to YouTube, are busy putting up historic photos to Flickr, and have a blog where they post documents and information about them.

After a break for lunch, I had the opportunity to go on one of the National Park Service's tours of the Roosevelt home. The ranger gave us a lot of information about FDR's background, life, and particularly the way his polio affected both him and the house. There are a few of his wheelchairs about the place, and we also got to see the manually-operated trunk lift (or giant dumb waiter) by means of which FDR was able to get up and downstairs in the house. There was great secrecy, of course, around his inability to walk, and his wheelchairs and ramps would be hidden when visitors came to the house so as to preserve the fiction that he was not as disabled as he was. One lovely anecdote that was shared though related to his love of political cartoons, a number of which hang in the entrance hall. Many of them are very anti-British, and when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came to visit in 1939, Sara Roosevelt thought quite strongly that they should be taken down, but FDR disagreed. So the cartoons stayed on the wall, and when the King came in, of course he went straight up to them, only to say "Mr President, you have some in your collection that I don't have!".

After the tour I had a wander around the museum, which includes FDR's study, kept just as it was in 1945. The Library contains FDR's own book collection as well as his papers, which is interesting in and of itself, and also means they have a lot of material you might not expect them to have, such as a large collection of pulp murder mysteries (including the one he was reading when he died), a collection of documents relating to earlier Presidents (they have the signature of every President pre-FDR in their collection), and most amazingly and unexpectedly, one of only two surviving copies of a 1480 missal from Utrecht, which Kirsten and Sarah brought out for me to see, along with a number of their crown jewel documents: a draft, with fascinating annotations, of his 'day of infamy' speech after Pearl Harbor; his speech for the signing of the social security act; his handwritten 'bedside note' from when he was informed in the middle of the night that Germany had invaded Poland (essentially his own press release); correspondence from King George in advance of the royal visit, as well as a wonderful set of instructions about what the King and Queen were to have provided for them in terms of breakfast and which newspapers were acceptable or not to be provided (The Times and The Telegraph among the former category, The Mail, The Mirror and The News of the World among the latter). I also got to see a couple of documents from the Eleanor Roosevelt papers which are of course also housed at the Library: her letter of resignation and indignation sent to the Daughters of the American Revolution after they withdrew their invitation to Marion Anderson, the famous African American singer, to perform in Constitution Hall (Mrs Roosevelt instead arranged for the concert to take place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial); and her annotated draft of the UN Declaration on Human Rights. As with the other treasures I've been privileged enough to see on this trip, seeing these documents was a real thrill. This aspect of my trip has really made so much of American history seem so much more 'real', almost.

Finally, Kirsten and Sarah took me on a tour of their stacks, which was a real visual demonstration of the extend and breadth of their collections - not just FDR's papers or Eleanor's, but vast holdings of papers from other individuals involved in the FDR administrations, as well as cabinet after cabinet of photos and huge quantities of sound and video recordings. It's been another fantastic and illuminating day!

I left Washington DC this morning and caught the train up to Philadelphia. I arrived in an absolute downpour and made my soggy way to the Library Company. This library was founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and has a fascinating and illustrious history. They were the largest library in America until the 1860s when the Library of Congress superseded them, and have incredibly extensive holdings of early printed books - half a million volumes, in fact, which makes them the second largest collection of early American imprints in the world. I met with the Librarian, Jim Green, and his colleague Rachel D'Agostino, who is their Curator of Printed Books. Jim gave me a lot of fascinating information about the focus and development of the library's collections, which are mostly pre-1880 and have been developed along subject lines, such as African American, Women's history, visual culture, popular medicine. I was surprised to learn they have such large collections relating to African American history in particular. The way they see the library is very different to the other libraries I've visited so far - the context provided by the library as a whole is very important; the collection is almost more important than the individual items. They see themselves as having a role to acquire and house older volumes that are discarded by other libraries, and view the social history that can be seen from their collection as very important.

I then went upstairs to meet some of the staff who look after their graphic collections and who are doing a lot of the library's digitisation work. They showed me some great examples from their collections, and demonstrated their Digital Collections catalogue, ImPAC. As well as digitising material themselves, often relating to their exhibitions, they are working with other websites such as phillyhistory.org and commercial partners such as Readex and Alexander Street Press. As with the other libraries I've talked to about digitisation, money and resources mean that this is largely being done in response to funders' interests, and again the theme came up of balancing this with the need to get uncatalogued material catalogued and made findable in the first place.

Finally, Rachel took me on a tour around the stacks, which are a veritable treasure trove. I don't think I've ever seen quite so many antiquarian books in one place ever before, and the wonders just kept on coming. They also hold the book collections belonging to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (which is next door; they look after the LCP's manuscript collections in return), and even have a few shelves of incunabula. There were amazing 19th century bindings, boxes and boxes of broadsides, and even, most randomly, a mummy's hand! I could have happily spent hours in there, and it was a wonderful introduction to the scope of their collections.

The Library Company felt in some ways more familiar and closer to my library and home institution, with their fellowship programs and the way their collections have grown often in relation to those fellows' interests. I was also left with a real sense of the historical aspect of the library as a total entity, and here, the importance of the container and the context, not just the content. This is unusual, in an era where increasingly the two are becoming divorced with digitisation, and really came across as this library's unique selling point.

I returned to the National Archives today, catching the shuttle out to the Archives II out in College Park, Maryland. This is a huge and impressive facility, built in the early 1990s in response to NARA's growing space problems at the downtown DC building. I was greeted by Patrice Murray, who had put together my schedule for my visits this week, and after passing through security (which really is very strict here - you can't get in without showing government issued ID, so if you ever come, don't forget your passport!), was taken to meet Vernon Smith, who talked me through the process by which researchers register in order to access the archives. He then took me up to the textual reading room, which is a really lovely space - light and airy and with lots of windows. Vernon explained that there are several reading rooms and they are divided by type of material - textual, maps, audio-visual, and images - as well as having a separate reading room for classified material. The textual reading room was a hive of activity, and apparently gets very busy in the summer. He also took me through to see where material is held for readers once it has been called up - they hold things for 3 days at a time, for a maximum of a month. It usually takes an hour or so for material to be fetched. The reading rooms are fairly intensively staffed, as all material has to be checked before anyone can copy it or take digital photos, and there are also research support staff on hand to help people find the material they need - the shelves and shelves of finding aids were a really clear reminder of how complicated this is.

After this introduction, I was taken down to the lecture room where I was due to give my talk. I'd been asked by the National Archives Assembly if I would give a presentation on supporting US history at Oxford, which was a great opportunity to share some information about the VHL, RAI and Bodleian Libraries. The talk was recorded too and will be distributed for staff in the regional offices to see as well.

Talk over, I was given a more extensive tour of the building by Patrice, and given some more background on the history of the facility. I also got to see the library there, which I hadn't even realised existed, but which contains a pretty sizeable collection of reference works which are there to support researchers who are working with the archival records.

In the afternoon I met a few other staff members for a wide-ranging discussion on all sorts of aspects of the National Archives work, particularly relating to access to records, their website and digitisation work, and use of social media - all the areas I'm particularly interested in. I learnt a huge amount from this discussion. I hadn't fully appreciated before a lot of the restrictions that are placed on records, even once they become available. A huge amount of material hasn't been fully reviewed, and has to be checked when someone requests it, so that even when you do come and place your request, that doesn't necessarily mean that you will get to see that material if it fails this review process. There is a sixty year rule in play here - records older than 1952 are generally available no problem, but for more recent records there's no guarantee, due, quite understandably, to concerns over personal data etc. Unfortunately though there is no way to tell from the catalogue whether something is going to be available. And an awful lot of their holdings are not yet in the online catalogue - something else I hadn't fully appreciated before. Almost everything at Archives I is there, but less than half of the records at Archives II are described in the catalogue. They are obviously working very hard to get through the backlog, but it's a huge task. Nonetheless, they are doing great work at improving their catalogue and I sense a real desire to get as much as possible in there and make it really the resource that researchers want.

Another thing I hadn't really realised before was the division between the civilian and military records, and the various different constituents that the Archives serve. Veterans are huge users of NARA records, often for making claims, and along with genealogists, make up the majority of researchers at the National Archives. Coming from an academic library and being used to thinking in terms of the needs of historians, this was illuminating and kind of reframes how I think about the way the Archives work. This whole area also explains a lot of the decisions in terms of where material is kept - the material kept in downtown DC is largely the kind of stuff that genealogists are particularly interested in, as that is where those users tend to be, for example.

I also learnt more about the various digitisation projects that are ongoing (largely genealogically driven with partners such as ancestry.com and fold3.com), and the Archives use of social media, which was particularly interesting in comparison to what I heard on the same topic at the Library of Congress yesterday. Then, before catching the shuttle back into DC, I got a quick peek into one of the stacks, as well as a brief conversion with the member of staff who is managing the Textual Services Divison's blog, The Text Message. All in all, it was another excellent and illuminating day!

I spent today at the Library of Congress, with a whirlwind but fabulous tour round many areas of the library's operations. My day began with a trip to get a readers' card (which I will not tweet, Stephen Fry style), before being taken into the magnificent Jefferson Building for a quick guided tour. My guide for the day, Donna Sokol, also took me into the main reading room, which is truly a glorious space, and talked me through the process of requesting material - all very much the same as at the Bodleian. We then went across to the Rare Books room, which is another beautiful space, and met Clark Evans, who talked to me about their collections and then pulled a few treasures from their stacks to show me - books owned (and annotated) by Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, a handwritten manuscript of a play by Mark Twain, the first book printed in the United States, a medieval English book, and even (somewhat unexpectedly) Charles Dickens's walking stick. As with the treasures I got to see at the University of Virginia, this was a wonderful demonstration of the breadth of the collection and the sort of material they hold.

After Rare Books I was taken up to the Newspapers Division and met Deb Thomas to learn more about the Chronicling America project. This is a resource that I point readers to all the time, so it was great to learn more about how the project came about and how it works. I didn't fully realise before how locally-driven it is - states apply for funding to carry out the digitisation and choose what titles and issues they will include for their state. This is the reason why Chronicling America does not cover the whole of the US, as some states simply haven't ever joined in. However more are doing so all the time - Indiana, North Dakota and West Virginia are the newest participants, although it will be some time before their content is available through the site - and they are hopeful that eventually they will have content from every state and territory. They're also doing a lot to create a fantastic resource around the content, building on the directory (which includes bibliographic data for thousands of titles from 1690-) to include links to digitised newspaper content elsewhere on the web. It was really useful to talk to Deb about the site in depth, and hear about the ways in which the site is developing. Deb is hoping to come to the UK soon, and if she does we're going to see whether we can arrange for her to come and give a talk, because I think that would be hugely useful for our readers.

Next up was Manuscripts, followed by Prints and Photographs. In both areas I got to have a little behind the scenes tour of some of the collections kept on site (including the Presidential Papers from Washington up to Coolidge) and learn more about how these are accessible. I was surprised to learn how easy it is for a reader to request this kind of material (and also the rare books from earlier). They obviously restrict certain items and material, but otherwise they will happily pull up whatever readers request and seem to have a very open policy. A lot is kept offsite, of course, and takes longer to fetch, but there is also a lot that is kept right by the reading rooms. Both Divisions are working to use the website to make their collections more accessible - Manuscripts are putting up their finding aids, but Prints & Photographs are particularly impressive here with their separate online catalogue. They have digitised a huge amount, although for many collections the high-res images are only available from on the Library's premises.

My guide at Prints & Photographs, Sara Duke, had arranged to take me to lunch with a group of other staff from all over the library, which was lovely to meet a whole range of other people informally. We were all chatting so animatedly that we overran and I ended up being late to my next appointment, which was with web services. I met Bill Kellum and Michelle Springer who were able to talk to me about the Library's use of social media. This appealed greatly to me with one of my other hats on, as chair of the Oxford libraries' web 2.0 working party. I've always been impressed with the Library of Congress's use of web 2.0 tools, and so it was useful to get more of an insight into the way they have approached these tools and the opportunities and risks that they present.

Next I went to see a scan lab in operation, to learn more about the actual processes behind the Library's digitisation projects. Dominic Sergi and his colleague spent some time talking me through the work of their department and I got to see one of their cameras in action, taking images of a collection of Abraham Lincoln letters. This whole area is something I didn't know a huge amount about, but was fascinating to see, and I was also able to pass on some appreciative feedback from the UK, as what they are doing to make parts of the Library's collections available online to researchers outside the Library is fantastic.

My day concluded with some time talking to Jurretta Heckscher in the Digital Reference section. She talked me through the collections available online, a lot of which I have explored already, but by no means all. She was able to give me a lot of useful pointers on where and how to find material on the website, especially in the less obvious places. She also sent me off with a whole lot of documentation that I can reuse for our readers, and I feel a blog post on the VHL resources blog on American Memory et al coming up when I get back!

Today has really been a wonderful day. Each and every person that I met and spent time with was incredibly welcoming and keen to share information and give me a really good insight into the Library, its collections and operations, and all the work that they are doing to make their resources available to the public.

I returned to Washington this morning and made my way straight to the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill to meet the Historian of the Senate, Don Ritchie. Don showed me their recently renovated office and introduced me to various other members of their staff. They are the people behind the online Biographical Directory of the US Congress, which is a fantastic resource that I often point students towards. They maintain files on every member of Congress, which are open to researchers to access, as well as
managing a huge oral history project. Don then took me down to visit the Senate Library, which primarily serves Senators and Congressional staffers, but also sometimes members of the press and researchers too. They are open whenever the Senate is in session (even if that means 2am!), and as well as a vastly comprehensive collection of Congressional publications, they have an extensive reference collection and a wide range of magazines and journals to support the needs of Senators.

After visiting the library, Don very kindly took me across to the Capitol building to give me a tour. It was fascinating to have such an expert guide to the history of the building, and as well as the main areas that the tour groups get to see, I got to see a bit more behind the scenes as well. I've been really struck already by how welcoming people are being and how generous of their time, and this was yet another example.

I spent the afternoon at the National Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue. I first spent some time talking to Nancy Smith, who is the Director of Presidential Materials and was able to tell me a great deal about the Presidential Libraries and the regulations, restrictions, and legislation under which Presidential papers are made available. I didn't realise before that there is a difference between the libraries for Presidents pre-1981 and those from Reagan forward, which have a whole lot more regulations governing their operations. Nancy gave me a very useful article which she had written explaining these, which I will take back and read and inwardly digest in order to improve my understanding of this whole area, which I think is crucial to be aware of in order to know what material is and isn't available to researchers. Nigel Bowles, the Director at the RAI, has suggested that Nancy come to Oxford at some point to give a presentation to students about the Presidential libraries, which she sounds keen to do, and which would be hugely valuable for our students. Nancy also gave me quite an insight into the work involved in making the Presidential documents and archives available, from the exponentially increasing amount of material (which email has exacerbated enormously - there are some 177 million pages of email from the George W Bush administration), which is all reviewed manually, to the tension between the desires of the private funders and the public needs and role of the libraries, and to the way she has to go to the White House on Inauguration Day to be on hand to advise as the archives of one administration are packed up and handed over. I learnt a lot from Nancy's expertise in this area in my time with her this afternoon.

After meeting with Nancy I had the opportunity to have a personal guided tour of the exhibits, including the Rotunda where the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights are housed, and finished off by meeting Lee Ann Potter, who is in charge of their education and outreach. They have a fantastic learning centre and do a lot of really great work with all sorts of visitors at all levels, from families with small children to schools to students and tourists and genealogists and researchers. It was interesting and inspiring to see how much importance the National Archives places on the various ways to make their collections accessible to all sorts of people and demonstrate just what kind of material they hold. Lee Ann also made the point that this kind of work also helps them understand who is interested in their collections and thereby better tailor what they do to the needs of their various users. I'm looking forward to following this afternoon with my day at the Archives facility in College Park on Thursday.

My trip begins in Charlottesville, VA, a thoroughly charming town which is home to the University of Virginia as well as quite a concentration of Presidential homes. I had arranged to spend the morning at the Miller Center, which was high on my list of places to get to because of their audiovisual resources (I'm always pointing readers to their Presidential Recordings Program), and also because in many ways the Miller Center is much like my home institution, the Rothermere American Institute. Like the Rothermere, it is an institute within a large University designed to bring scholars together working on a particular aspect, and hosts public events designed to promote a greater understanding of their particular subject area. Unlike the Vere Harmsworth Library though, the Miller Center library is small and not focused on building and maintaining comprehensive book collections; instead their real focus is on their digital collections, and making available their rich resources of oral history and Presidential recordings and speeches.

I was looked after by their librarian, Sheila Blackford, who welcomed me warmly and spent a good amount of time showing me their digital resources. I knew about the White House tapes, of course, and had a basic knowledge of some of the other areas of their collections, but seeing the extent of it was really useful, as well as the ways in which they are working to make this all publicly available via their website. They have just overhauled this, and have been changing the ways they present these resources. They have portal pages for each President which then link to the relevant collections, which for non-advanced users in particular looks very intuitive and helpful. It was also interesting to hear about how they work with the National Archives and Presidential Libraries to access their content and make it available alongside their own. I was also taken on a tour of the building, which is full of fabulous photographs of Presidents, and dropped in to learn more about their oral history project. The files for the George H.W. Bush oral histories are due to be released next month, with the exception of a few where the interviewee has specified they should remain closed.

After my library visit, I attended the Miller Center Forum that was taking place this morning, where former New York Times journalist Janny Scott was speaking about her book on Barack Obama's mother. It was a fascinating to hear about her unconventional life and the insights into it from people that knew her, including President Obama himself. I was invited to attend the lunch after the Forum where the discussion continued further. Ms Scott was an excellent and engaging speaker, and the topic was one I hadn't really considered much before, but was really interesting, especially given that Obama himself has been responsible for constructing his own identity when it comes to his family roots to a large extent. I also had the opportunity at lunch to talk with other members of the Miller Center staff, as well as a retired rare books librarian who worked for many years at UVa.

This afternoon I went down to the main campus of the University for a visit at the Small Special Collections Library, which has some of the most extensive and impressive manuscript collections for US history. Petrine Jackson gave me a tour of their lovely building and exhibitions, before spending time showing me a whole load of wonderful materials which she had selected and brought up for me to see. These included a 1616 letter describing Virginia in a positive light, sent back to England; Thomas Jefferson's own copy of his Notes on the State of Virginia, complete with marginalia and his annotations; a letter from James Madison; various documents relating to slavery; and the record of Virginia's vote to secede from the Union. It was a real treat to see these materials and to have such a knowledgeable guide to them in Petrina.

It's been a wonderful first day to my visits, and lovely to have such a warm welcome from everyone I've met here today. I only hope the rest of my trip can live up to the high standard today has set!