Butch Lazorchak of the Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program brings us this guest post on the Library’s involvement in one of the most important conferences for the creative and technology communities: The South By Southwest Conference, being held in Austin, Texas, March 11-20, 2011, has rapidly become one of the most influential …
As is the case with many technologies, especially the mobile variety, the Japanese have been ahead of the rest of us for a while on something that has only recently begun to catch fire everywhere else: “QR Codes.” (QR=quick response.) If you’re not familiar, they are 2D barcodes that represent strings of letters, numbers and …
(UPDATE: Here’s a December 2017 status report on our work with the Twitter archives.) (UPDATE: Here’s a January 2013 status report on our work with the Twitter archives.) Twitter’s gift (link is PDF) to the Library of Congress of its entire archive of public tweets, announced two weeks ago today, sure has stoked the public’s interest. …
Quite often I have to “sit on” very exciting news here until all the details are put into place, and whatever we’re going to announce is ready for prime-time. Such is the case with the new version of our Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC, pronounced “P-pock”), which has launched within the past few days. …
The Library is a place of superlatives–the biggest this, the first that–and now we’ve added another one to the list that will be a great benefit to patrons in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room (and off-site). This week Mark Sweeney, chief of the Serial and Government Publications Division, along with assistant chief Teri …
(The following is a guest article about new preservation capabilities at the LOC by my colleague Donna Urschel, which was recently published in the the Library’s staff newsletter, the Gazette.) For many decades, details of the 1791 Pierre L’Enfant Plan of Washington, D.C.—one of the many treasures at the Library of Congress—had been obscured. A …
This feels a little like a birth announcement: The Library of Congress has launched its second official blog since the one you’re now reading took the blogosphere by storm in April 2007. (Hyperbole much?) The Library’s Science, Technology and Business Division is an excellent addition to our growing social-media family. The very name of the …
Whether you can be in Washington tomorrow or not, there are many ways for everyone to be a part of the 2009 National Book Festival. I came up with at least a dozen: 1. Attend! It’s tomorrow (Sept. 26) from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EDT on the National Mall (between 7th and 14th), rain …
The next two days for us will be a whirlwind of events as we celebrate the ninth annual edition of the National Book Festival. But there’s one aspect I just absolutely had to call out. Our folks have been busily working behind the scenes on a revamp of our literacy.gov website, which promotes lifelong literacy …