Friends, data wranglers, lend me your ears; The Library of Congress’ Selected Datasets Collection is now live! You can now download datasets of the Simple English Wikipedia, the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, sports economic data, half a million emails from Enron, and urban soil lead abatement from this online collection. This initial set of […]
Category: Digital Content
Experimenting with speech-to-text and collections at the Library
This guest blog post is shared by Chris Adams, Solutions Architect in the Office of the Chief Information Officer/IT Design & Development Directorate, and Julia Kim, Digital Projects Coordinator at the National Library for the Blind and Print Disabled at the Library of Congress, formerly the Digital Assets Specialist at the American Folklife Center, supporting […]
Making a valuable resource even better: the Recommended Formats Statement and RFS 2.0
Today’s guest post is from Jesse Johnston (Sr. Research Development Officer Office of Research, Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Michigan), Kate Murray (Digital Projects Coordinator, Digital Collections Management & Services Division), Marcus Nappier (Digital Collections Specialist, Digital Content Management Section), and Ted Westervelt, Chief, US/Anglo Division. It has become ever more […]
LC Labs Letter: May 2020
May’s monthly newsletter from the LC Labs team.
LC Maps for Robots
The following is a repost from the blog Worlds Revealed: Geography & Maps at the Library of Congress. The author is Rachel Trent, Digital Collections and Automation Coordinator in the Geography and Maps Division. Interested in bulk downloading maps from the Library of Congress’s online collections? Need a corpus of historical map images to build a training dataset […]
Innovator Ben Lee and LC Labs Host “Data Jam” with 100 Million Historic Newspaper Images
A gallery of historic moustaches, a wall of 12,000 photos, a collage of First World War-era “damn the Kaiser” cartoons, and more were on display May 7, when 135 people attended a virtual “data jam” to dig into a massive new collection of historic newspaper images. LC Labs hosted the event to showcase Library of […]
LC Labs Letter: April 2020
LC LABS LETTER A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Editor’s Note As it did for many people across the country and all over the world, the month of March brought new ways of working and communicating and challenging, complex circumstances for the LC Labs team. We found […]
Innovator Brian Foo Incorporates “Citizen DJs” into Design Process
The following is a guest post by Innovator in Residence Brian Foo, creator of Citizen DJ. The Citizen DJ project invites the public to make music using the free-to-use audio and video collections from the Library of Congress. The project will feature online tools for exploring and remixing tens of thousands of sounds from a variety of collections ranging from music to government film to oral histories.
Earth Day 2020 Has Gone Digital
This is a guest post by Jennifer “JJ” Harbster, Head of the Science Reference Section in the Library’s Science, Technology and Business Division. She had her first taste of web archiving with the Internet Archive’s collaborative project documenting Hurricane Katrina and went on to lead the Science Blogs Web Archive. On April 22, 2020 we […]
Newspaper Navigator Surfaces Treasure Trove of Historic Images – Get a Sneak Peek at Upcoming Data Jam!
Projects like Newspaper Navigator are busy unlocking even more digital content for members of the public to access from home. On May 7th at 2pm EST, Innovator in Residence Ben Lee will host a virtual data jam to experiment and play with thousands of images—including maps, advertisements, comics, and more!—from historical newspapers dating to the 1800s. In this post, Ben discusses his aspirations for engaging the American public with the millions of images he extracted from Chronicling America.