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By: Mike Ashenfelder
FedScoop, the Washington DC government tech media company, announced that Congress.gov is one of their nominees for the 2016 FedScoop 50 awards. Features on Congress.gov (which In Custodia Legis has been posting about throughout its development) include: Ability to narrow and refine search results Ability to simultaneously search all content across all available years Bill …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Kristi Finefield
As I swelter through the dog days of summer along with my fellow Washingtonians, my overheated mind called forth a favorite print from our Fine Prints collection. The grace and simplicity of this lithograph are compelling enough, but the promise of a refreshing splashdown and a cool breeze on the way down is what caught …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Stephen Winick
The following is a guest post by Jennifer Cutting. The “Five Questions” interview was performed by Danna Bell, from the Library of Congress’s Educational Outreach office. A shorter version of her answers is available at their blog, Teaching with the Library of Congress. Describe what you do at the Library of Congress and the materials …
Posted in: Folklife Today
By: Lara Szypszak
As teachers prepare course materials for the upcoming school year, many will think of ways to combine fun with learning. One item from our collection that has proven attractive to many visiting teachers at the Library is the 1890 game Rambles Through Our Country- An Instructive Geographical Game for the Young. The goal of the …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Cary O’Dell
While it’s natural that people would associate the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division with, well, film, video, and sound recordings, we have a tremendous amount of associated documentation like scripts, lobby cards, pressbooks, and copyright descriptive material. We also have well more than a million publicity stills, a fraction of which we’ve used …
Posted in: Now See Hear!
By: Mike Ashenfelder
This is a guest post by Leah Weinryb Grohsgal of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Historic newspapers offer rich histories of American life, with glimpses into politics, sports, shopping, music, food, health, science, movies and everything in between. The National Digital Newspaper Program, a joint effort between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Cary O’Dell
The following is a guest post by Jenny Paxson of the Culpeper Campus. Adventure films, operetta, comedy and silent movies are all part of the August film schedule at The Library of Congress Packard Campus Theater. David March, a Preservation Specialist in the Moving Image Section and one the three projectionists for the theater, is …
Posted in: Now See Hear!
By: Julie Stoner
One of my favorite memories of visiting my grandparents’ house during summer vacation is my grandpa teaching me to play croquet in the side yard. I became nostalgic for those summer days when I came across this Civil War era photograph of a group playing croquet in Washington D.C. I decided to search the collections …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Mike Ashenfelder
This is a guest post by Ted Westervelt, head of acquisitions and cataloging for U.S. Serials – Arts, Humanities & Sciences at the Library of Congress. As summer has fully arrived now, so too has the revised 2016-2017 version of the Library of Congress’s Recommended Formats Statement. When the Library of Congress first issued the …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Jaime Mears
On June 14 and 15, the Library of Congress hosted Archives Unleashed 2.0, a web archive “datathon” (otherwise known as a “hackathon,” but apparently any term with the word “hack” in it might sound a bit menacing) in which teams of researchers used a variety of analytical tools to query web-archive data sets in the hopes of discovering some intriguing insights before their 48-hour deadline …
Posted in: The Signal