A short tale about how I was temporarily lured from my hiatus by the Library of Congress and some pugilistic pussy cats

It might look like a cat fight, but this very short video is a piece of history. It was filmed in July 1894 at Thomas Edison's Black Maria studio, and features "amusement entrepreneur" Professor Harry Welton and two furry felines wearing gloves.

This historical oddity is one of 70 videos added to YouTube by the Library of Congress (LOC), which yesterday announced the launch of its own YouTube Channel, while noting that the LOC is "the world's preeminent reservoir of knowledge...the steward of millions of recordings dating from the earliest Edison films to the present."

Discussing the move to YouTube on the LOC blog, the library's communications director, Matt Raymond, writes:

But this is just the beginning. We have made a conscious decision that we’re not just going to upload a bunch of videos and then walk away. As with our popular Flickr pilot project, we intend to keep uploading additional content. We’re modifying some of our work-flows in modest ways to make our content more useful and delivered across platforms with built-in audiences of millions.

Not so incidentally, all of the videos we post on YouTube will also be available at LOC.gov (and many, many more, of course) on American Memory, many of which are newly digitized in much higher resolution by the fine Motion Picture, Broadcast and Recorded Sound conservators in Culpeper, Va.

And that's all I have to say right now. I'm still on hiatus from blogging, but this news was too good to wait. Follow the links in this post and you'll discover a myriad diversions. Meanwhile, I have something else to do...