The term “open science” is often deployed in the scholarly discourse without much thought about its meaning and use. Benedikt Fecher and Tony Ross-Hellauer unpack the term and find it to be understood in a variety of ways; as a new framework for what has always been expected of science, as a political slogan to motivate change, as a business […]
Category: digital scholarship
Digital Scholarship Resource Guide: So now you have digital data… (part 3 of 7)
This is part three of our Digital Scholarship Research Guide created by Samantha Herron. See parts one about digital scholarship projects and two about how to create digital documents. So now you have digital data… Great! But what to do? Regardless of what your data are (sometimes it’s just pictures and documents and notes, sometimes […]
From Code to Colors: Working with the loc.gov JSON API
The following is a guest post by Laura Wrubel, software development librarian with George Washington University Libraries, who has joined the Library of Congress Labs team during her research leave. The Library of Congress website has an API ( “application programming interface”) which delivers the content for each web page. What’s kind of exciting is […]
The scholarly commons must be developed on public standards
Access to scholarship is becoming ever more dependent on one’s (or one’s institution’s) financial means. Björn Brembs and Guy Geltner argue that one solution to these growing problems is for scholarship to have open, public standards; both for its Web 1.0 tasks, like reading, writing, and citing, but also, crucially, for its Web 2.0 functionalities too. Scholarship is a social […]
Digital Scholarship Resource Guide: Making Digital Resources, Part 2 of 7
This is part two in a seven part resource guide for digital scholarship by Samantha Herron, our 2017 Junior Fellow. Part one is available here, and the full guide is available as a PDF download. Creating Digital Documents The first step in creating an electronic copy of an analog (non-digital) document is usually scanning it […]
New Year, New You: A Digital Scholarship Guide (in seven parts!)
To get 2018 going in a positive digital direction, we are releasing a guide for working with digital resources. Every Wednesday for the next seven weeks a new part of the guide will be released on The Signal. The guide covers what digital archives and digital humanities are trying to achieve, how to create digital documents, […]
Announcing Judging Panel for the Congressional Data Challenge
Today we’re announcing the notable panel of judges who will select the winners of the Library’s ongoing Congressional Data Challenge: a competition asking participants to leverage legislative data sets on Congress.gov and other platforms to develop digital projects that analyze, interpret or share congressional data in user-friendly ways. The four-person panel, composed of experts in data visualization, application development, […]
Lowering barriers to using collections in an NDSR workshop with Shawn Averkamp
This is a guest post by Charlotte Kostelic, National Digital Stewardship Resident with the Library of Congress and Royal Collection Trust for the Georgian Papers Programme. Her project focuses on exploring ways to optimize access and use among related digital collections held at separate institutions. This work has included a comparative analysis of international metadata […]
Rebooting digital collections: putting the user at the heart of Charles Booth’s London
The primary research material of Charles Booth’s pioneering study of poverty in London survives in the form of the famous poverty maps and notebooks. Neil Stewart and Andy Jack recount how the LSE Library worked to refresh and update the Booth web presence to properly reflect the significance of this archive. Also, on International Digital Preservation Day, the authors outline aspects […]
Welcoming Laura Wrubel and exploring digital scholarship at the Library of Congress
In November, the LC Labs team welcomed Laura Wrubel as she kicked off her research leave in residence with the Library of Congress. Over the next 3 months, she’ll explore digital scholarship with our team and how it might be best supported. We checked in with her to learn more about her goals, background, and […]