LC LABS LETTER A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team The Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud Project is HIRING! Come join the Mellon-funded Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud Project as one of two digital scholarship specialists! The positions will be funded for three years and will […]
Category: Inside the Library
Digital Strategy Year in Review
This is a guest post by Leah Weinryb-Grohsgal from the Digital Strategy Directorate. Leah outlines below some of the major milestones reached by the Directorate in 2019. Looking Back and Looking Forward Exciting changes are afoot for digital transformation at the Library of Congress! This post reviews some of the things we did last year […]
Expanding Digital Collecting at the Library
Discussion of the progress toward the goals of the five year plan described in Collecting Digital Content at the Library of Congress, with emphasis on the six objectives of the framework and a list of notable accomplishments in FY2019.
Sprinting toward a Lab: defining, connecting and writing a book in five days
A lab is where experimental and research-focused tools, methods, and services are incubated. The starting premise for a lab is often wanting to spur change and make space for new practice and new people. Yet calling something a lab can also signal separation between traditional services and new approaches. Labs, and innovation in general, can […]
Resilience in the Commons: Acquiring and Preserving Open Access Latin American Monographs
Today’s guest post is from Charlotte Kostelic, a Digital Collections Specialist within the Digital Content Management Section of the Library of Congress. The move toward publishing research through open publishing models is growing internationally, but in Latin America, Open Access (OA) publishing is growing at a faster rate than elsewhere. Recent studies suggest 51-95% of […]
Building Digital Content Management Capacity with Library Carpentry
In September, the Library hosted a Library Carpentry workshop to help library staff develop advanced digital skills and explore tools useful for managing digital collections and metadata. Building on the Library’s previous Software Carpentry workshop, the 2018 workshop presented an opportunity for us to explore the growing “Library Carpentry” curriculum. This effort, which adopts the […]
Science Blogs Web Archive
This guest post is an interview with Lisa Massengale, Head of the Science Reference Section, with contributions by the Web Archive’s creator Jennifer Harbster, a Science Reference and Research Specialist for the Science, Technology and Business Division from Oct. 2001- Dec. 2015. Along with her reference duties for the Library’s Science Reference Service, she created […]
Inside, Inside Baseball: A Look at the Construction of the Dataset Featuring the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress Digital Collections
This is a guest blog post by visiting scholar archivist Julia Hickey who is on a professional development assignment from the Defense Media Activity to the Library of Congress Labs team. Julia has been helping us prepare for and build out a visualization of collection data for our Inside Baseball event. This post was also […]
User Experience (UX) Design in Libraries: An Interview with Natalie Buda Smith
Natalie Buda Smith is the User Experience (UX) Team supervisor at the Library of Congress, and most recently worked with NDI to design the beautiful graphic for our Collections as Data conference. Her team has been busy redesigning Loc.gov, and the new homepage is set to debut Tuesday, Nov.1st. We caught up over coffee […]
Keeping Our Tools Sharp: Approaching the Annual Review of the Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement
The following post is by Ted Westervelt, head of acquisitions and cataloging for U.S. Serials in the Arts, Humanities & Sciences section at the Library of Congress. Since first launching its Recommended Formats Statement (then called Recommended Format Specifications in 2014), the Library of Congress has committed to treating it as an important part of […]