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By: Gilbert Busch
“Why is it called a recorder when it doesn’t record?” I wondered as the unmistakable sound of recorders reached my ears. We were on our way home from church, and the car radio was playing a Baroque concerto. Later, a computer search showed that recorder is from the Latin word recordari, to remember, or to …
Posted in: NLS Music Notes
By: Kerry Ward
The following is the third of a three-part blog post focusing on Military Photographers. You can read the original post HERE and the second post HERE. During the tremendous upheaval of the 1960s and with the Vietnam War in full effect, the country was in desperate need of emotive displays of patriotism while still accurately recording …
Posted in: Folklife Today
By: Abbey Potter
This is part four in a seven part resource guide for digital scholarship by Samantha Herron, our 2017 Junior Fellow. Part one is available here, part two about making digital documents is here, part three is about tools to work with data, and part four (below) is all about doing text analysis. The full guide is available …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Kristi Finefield
In the first entry in this occasional series, Profiling Portraits, we examined occupational portraits, a type of portrait designed to tell the viewer a specific fact about the sitter: their occupation. We will now look at another type of portrait, one which is very popular today, thanks to the advent of smartphones with cameras: self-portraits, …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Abbey Potter
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 …
Posted in: The Signal
By: George Thuronyi
The following is a guest post by Cindy Abramson, assistant general counsel. The Copyright Office has been hard at work trying to find ways to decrease wait times for registration applications and to decrease burdens placed on applicants. We are excited to announce today that we have published a new rule that helps further both …
Posted in: Copyright
By: Meghan Ferriter
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 …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Melissa Lindberg
The following is an interview with Kit Arrington, Digital Library Specialist in the Prints and Photographs Division, about a project to scan the entire Popular Graphic Arts collection, for which she served as project manager. About a month ago I had a conversation with Senior Cataloger Woody Woodis about his work on the same project. …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Abbey Potter
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 …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Cary O’Dell
After 22 previous posts, the Moving Image and Recorded Sound division of the Library of Congress has, with this final assortment, exhausted its currently slate of unidentified stills. (Or, at least until we acquire some more!) Thanks to everyone who has looked at these over the last year or so and has solved them or offered …
Posted in: Now See Hear!