Today’s post is from Jesse Johnston and Jon Sweitzer-Lamme. Jon is the Librarian in Residence at The Library of Congress’ Preservation Directorate. He is a 2017 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s iSchool, receiving a MSLIS with a minor in Museum Studies and a certificate in Special Collections. On November 2, the Library hosted […]
Category: Outreach and Events
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 […]
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 […]
Librarians learn about personal archiving at the Library of Congress
On April 16th and 17th, National Digital Initiatives in partnership with DC Public Library hosted the Memory Lab Network Bootcamp at the Library of Congress. The Memory Lab Network – a cohort of 7 urban, rural, and tribal library systems – will build digitization stations and teach classes through an IMLS grant to support personal […]
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, […]
Announcing the Library of Congress Congressional Data Challenge
Today we launch a 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. “There is so much information now available online about our legislative process, and that is a great thing,” said Librarian […]
DC History For All: Volunteer Fair Event Summary
On Saturday, 23 September 2017, the LC Labs team joined representatives from cultural heritage organizations, archives, libraries, and historical organizations for DC History for All: Volunteer Fair. The event matched dozens of interested volunteers with opportunities to preserve Washington, D.C. history. There are many cultural heritage and historical organizations located in D.C. that invite the […]
Hack-to-Learn at the Library of Congress
When hosting workshops, such as Software Carpentry, or events, such as Collections As Data, our National Digital Initiatives team made a discovery—there is an appetite among librarians for hands-on computational experience. That’s why we created an inclusive hackathon, or a “hack-to-learn,” taking advantage of the skills librarians already have and paring them with programmers to […]
Women’s History Month Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
This is a guest post from Sarah Osborne Bender, Director of the Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. I graduated from library school in 2001, just months after Wikipedia was launched. So as a freshly minted information professional, it is no surprise that I fell […]
Lots of Transfer Collectives Keep Cultural Memory Safe: The Importance of Community Audio/Visual Archiving
This is a guest post collectively written by the XFR Collective (pronounced “transfer collective”), a grass-roots digitization and digital-preservation organization. They work with artists and media creators to rescue and preserve digital works, utilizing open, free platforms — such as the Internet Archive — for long-term preservation and access. We featured them in two previous […]