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 […]
Category: open data
Connections in Sound and at the Library of Congress: Reaching out to experts to connect Irish traditional music through Linked Data
Patrick Egan is a scholar and musician from Ireland, who served as a Kluge Fellow in Digital Studies at the Kluge Center. He has recently earned his PhD in digital humanities with ethnomusicology in at University College Cork. Patrick’s interests over the past number of years have focused on ways to creatively use descriptive data in […]
Library’s Collections Come to Life as 3D Models
The 3D Digital Modeling, Imaging, and Printing Working Group was created to explore the use of 3D technologies to expand access to the Library’s collections. In Fall 2019, the working group launched a pilot in which a limited selection of items from the online collections were 3D scanned and the 3D models made publicly available. In […]
The State of Open Data 2019 – What are the key issues in open data for researchers?
As mandates and policies encouraging open data are becoming more widely established and enforced, the use of and sharing of data is becoming more central to scholarly communication. This has resulted in data sharing becoming increasingly entangled with the prestige economy of academia. In this post, Mark Hahnel presents findings from the largest continuous survey of academic attitudes to open data […]
Introducing the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud Project
With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the LC Labs team will pilot ways to combine cutting edge technology and the collections of the largest library in the world, to support creative new uses of collections. This project will explore service models to support researchers accessing Library of Congress collections in the cloud, with findings shared throughout the 2 year project.
Introducing Ben and Brian, the Library’s new Innovators in Residence!
Introducing our 2019 Innovators in Residence Brian Foo and Ben Lee. Learn more about their backgrounds and experience, as well as what they plan to accomplish during their residencies.
Celebrating a year with By the People
Celebrating the 1 year anniversary of By the People, the Library of Congress crowdsourcing platform that engages volunteers to explore and connect to Library of Congress collections while enhancing searchability, readability, and research use of digitized collections. In the last year over 11,000 volunteers have registered and even more have contributed anonymously to complete transcription of over 31,000 digital collection pages, with 55,000 awaiting peer review.
In the Library’s Web Archives: US Government Audio on Shuffle
The Digital Content Management section has been working on a project to extract and make available sets of files from the Library’s significant web archives holdings. This is another step to explore the web archives and make them more widely accessible and usable. Our aim in creating these sets is to identify reusable, “real world” content in the Library’s […]
New strategy! New crowd! New team!
Big news! We’ll launch a crowdsourcing program at the Library of Congress on October 24. We’re asking everyone to join us as we improve discovery and access across our diverse collections through transcription and tagging. The program is grounded in what we’ve learned through our previous experiences with participatory projects at the Library, including image […]
Research data should be available long-term…but who is going to pay?
There is now a broad consensus that sharing and preserving data makes research more efficient, reproducible and potentially innovative. As such, most funding bodies now require research data to be stored, preserved, and made available long-term. But who is going to pay for this to happen? Marta Teperek and Alastair Dunning outline how the costs of long-term data preservation are […]