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. …
Audrey Fischer of the Library’s Public Affairs Office offers this guest blog item for Saturday: April 24 marks the Library’s 210th anniversary. Let it be said that the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution keeps getting better with age. In 2000, the Library of Congress celebrated its bicentennial. That same year it embarked on a mission …
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 …