Interested in learning more about what’s new in the Library of Congress’ digital collections? The Signal shares updates on new additions to our digital collections and we love showing off all the hard work of our colleagues from across the Library. Read on for a sample of what’s been added recently and some of our favorite highlights. Click here for previous updates.
What’s new on loc.gov?
Silent Film Scores and Arrangements
Music and sound have always served an integral role in film and the Silent Film Scores and Arrangements digital collection offers unique insight into that development. This collection includes over 3,000 items published or created for use in silent film accompaniment between 1904 – 1927. These items include scores written for specific films, cue sheets that compile melodies for use at certain moments in specific films, and stock music composed or arranged for general use in silent film. Scores and arrangements included in this collection include piano scores, full or reduced orchestral scores, instrumental parts, or just melodic incipits.
Collection updates and migrations
Updated collections this month include the Foreign Legal Gazettes, which now features the Official gazette of Costa Rica, and the Occupational Folklife Project, which now features Hope For Recovery: Peer Support Workers in Kentucky.
New datasets
Four new datasets were added to the Selected Datasets collection on loc.gov since our last edition. These include the three transcription datasets for the George S. Patton papers – diaries, the Alan Lomax Collection, and the John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax Papers, as well as the COVID-19 data repository.
New Open Access eBooks
Over 1,300 new openly available eBook titles were added to the collection. Highlights from May and June include titles related to Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage, such as Pacific youth: local and global futures, and Louder and faster: pain, joy, and the body politic in Asian American taiko; titles showcasing African American history and culture, such as Get your ass in the water and swim like me: African American narrative poetry from oral tradition and Listening to the Lomax Archive: the sonic rhetorics of African American folksong in the 1930s (below); and titles exploring LGBTQIA+ topics in Europe, like Queering the migrant in contemporary European cinema and Queer festivals: challenging collective identities in a transnational Europe.
Also included are some newer publications on government, technology, and education, including: Sending your government a message: e-mail communication between citizens and government (below), Computers and games for mental health and well-being, Mapping the risks: assessing homeland security implications of publicly available geospatial information and Focus on the wonder years: challenges facing the American middle school.
In addition, nearly 500 publications from the Library’s Oversees Operations were made available, with titles on topics ranging from environmental impact to technology, like Connecting Indonesia: Facebook’s social and economic impact in Indonesia and The impacts of climate change on agriculture and water resources in Cambodia: from local communities perspectives.
July is Disability Pride Month and a number of titles are newly available exploring and showcasing this community, including: Disability in different cultures: reflections on local concepts, and Academic ableism: disability and higher education (below).
New digital materials available onsite-only
Have you seen our past blog posts about Stacks? ICYMI, Stacks is the Library’s primary onsite platform for accessing rights-restricted digital content from the Library’s collections. New items are added every week and we invite you to come visit the Library’s variety of reading rooms & research centers to explore the latest releases into Stacks for yourself!
Some new seasonal Stacks titles include The bucket list guide to summer, Birds of Maryland & Delaware field guide: includes Washington, D.C. & the Chesapeake Bay, Juneteenth: a first look, Gold panning the Pacific Northwest: a guide to the area’s best sites for gold, Send a ranger: my life serving the National Parks, Sons of baseball: growing up with a Major League dad, and Books for idle hours: nineteenth-century publishing and the rise of summer reading.
New materials in Chronicling America
The Library of Congress has released new digitized newspapers from 35 states and territories in the Beta Chronicling America collection! There are now 14.1 million newspaper pages available, out of a total of 20.5 million pages. The digitized newspapers can be searched at the same time as other digitized collections or can be searched or browsed as a separate collection. Patrons can do a simple or advanced search for keywords or can use the left-side facets to narrow results within a search. We will provide additional updates as we migrate the rest of the collection.
New crowdsourced transcriptions
Over 41,000 crowdsourced transcriptions from the By the People “Organizing for Women’s Suffrage: The NAWSA Records” campaign are now available on loc.gov. You can use keywords to search these records with transcriptions and view side-by-side text of individual pages (see below!).
Leave us any questions or comments below and keep an eye out for our next edition!