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By: Jeff Bridgers
The following is a guest post by Gay Colyer, Digital Library Specialist in the Prints and Photographs Division. Not every Northerner who traveled to the Confederacy during the Civil War went to fight. Some journeyed South on a variety of educational and humanitarian missions. After Federal forces seized Beaufort, South Carolina, and the sea islands …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Robert Casper
The following is a cross-post by Stephen Winick, writer and editor at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, for the Library’s Folklife Today blog. At AFC, we’re excited about the Library’s new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Juan Felipe Herrera. He’s a fascinating person and a great poet, and he has a deep interest …
Posted in: From the Catbird Seat
By: Mike Ashenfelder
“The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation.” — George Washington The Veterans History Project honors the lives and service of all American veterans –not …
Posted in: The Signal
“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” — The Water Rat, in The Wind in the Willows The following is a guest post by Marilyn Ibach, Reference Specialist, Prints and Photographs Division. It is part of the Pictures to Go series of posts …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Erin Engle
Kalev Leetaru, a senior fellow at George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, has written for The Signal in previous posts. I recently had the chance to ask him about his latest work, processing and analyzing digitized books stretching back two centuries. Erin: You recently completed research and analysis on large datasets of …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Susan Manus
The following is a guest post by Barrie Howard, IT project manager at the Library of Congress. The Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) program is pleased to announce the successful completion of another train-the-trainer workshop in 2015. The most recent workshop took place in Sacramento, California, from September 22th–25th. This domestic training event follows …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Erin Engle
Talk about newsworthy! Chronicling America, an online searchable database of historic U.S. newspapers, has posted its 10 millionth page today. Way back in 2013, Chronicling America boasted 6 million pages available for access online. The site makes digitized newspapers (of those published between 1836 and 1922) available through the National Digital Newspaper Program. It also …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Kate Murray
The digital preservation community is a connected and collaborative one. I first heard about the Europe-based PREFORMA project last summer at a Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative meeting when we were discussing the Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting comparison matrix. My interest was piqued because I heard about their incorporation of FFV1 and Matroska, …
Posted in: The Signal
By: Kristi Finefield
The following is a guest post by Martha H. Kennedy, Curator of Popular & Applied Graphic Arts, Prints and Photographs Division. Travel by train, or what some called the “Iron horse,” dominated other forms of transport in America for nearly fifty years. During this “golden age” of railroads that began in 1865, public fascination with …
Posted in: Picture This
By: Mike Ashenfelder
Many cultural institutions have accelerated the development of their digital collections and data sets by allowing citizen volunteers to help with the millions of crucial tasks that archivists, scientists, librarians, and curators face. One of the ways institutions are addressing these challenges is through crowdsourcing. In this post, I’ll look at a few sample crowdsourcing projects …
Posted in: The Signal