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.