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 […]
Category: Partners and Collaboration
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.
Announcing International Collaborations on Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions
The following is an announcement from funding and cultural organizations from the United States and the United Kingdom about a new collaboration supporting digital scholarship. The Library of Congress Labs team is co-hosting a workshop to kick-off international collaborations around digital scholarship. Partners in the UK and the US are coming together to collaborate on the […]
Summer of Machine Learning Collaboration with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Interview with University of Nebraska-Lincoln research team about their machine learning approaches and experience working with Library of Congress collections and LC Labs team.
Creative Technologist and 2018 Papamarkou Chair Tahir Hemphill Looks Back on his Year in the Archives
This is a guest post from Tahir Hemphill, the 2018 Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Labs team first met Tahir – a creative technologist, educator and radical archivist – when we invited him to speak at our Collections as Data: Impact conference about his […]
Born to Be 3D: Born-Digital Data Stewardship
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 […]
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 […]
January Innovator-in-Residence Update: Experiments with Jer Thorp
We’ve been delighted to have Library of Congress Innovator-in-Residence Jer Thorp with us since October. During the first three months of his residency he has connected with staff, visited collections, and explored forms of data to make better sense the inner workings of the Library. Jer has been weaving together those threads with experiments and […]