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.

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What’s new on loc.gov?

Larry Colwell Dance Photographs (Music)

This digital collection represents the entire contents of the Music Division’s collection of Larry Colwell Dance Photographs. In studio portraits, Colwell captured many ballet stars of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the New York City Ballet, including George Balanchine, Alexandra Danilova, Talley Beatty, Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil LeClerq. The collection contains black-and-white photo contact sheets, negatives, and photographs, all taken by Larry Colwell.

A few collection updates

Updated collections this month include the Foreign Legal Gazettes, which now features new issues of from Kenya, Botswana, and Grenada. And check out these 55 new recordings that are now available in the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature.

A new section was added into the Occupational Folklife Project collection, which “began in 2010 as a multi-year project by the American Folklife Center (AFC) to document the culture of contemporary American workers during an era of economic and social transition.” The new section, Beyond the Breakwater: Gulf of Alaska Small-Boat Fishermen (Archie Green Fellows Project, 2021 to 2022), below, features interviews with twenty participants.

50 new recordings are now available in The PALABRA Archive, including Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s reading “In Praise of Mystery: a Poem for Europa,” a poem that was commissioned by NASA for the Europa Clipper Mission, together with Puerto Rican poet Roque Rivera, who translated the piece into Spanish. Learn more about the poet laureate project here.

Two new datasets available

Last month, we added two new datasets into the Selected Datasets collection on loc.gov: the transcription datasets for the Black South Carolinians’ Petition for Equal Rights and the National American Woman Suffrage Association Records campaigns from the By the People crowdsourced transcription program. You can download these datasets directly from their catalog records and open them in a spreadsheet application of your choice!

To learn about about what you can do with these full-text transcription datasets, check out these two blog posts from Peter DeCraene, a 2021-22 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress: Datasets as Primary Sources: An Archaeological Dig into Our Collective Brains, Part 1 and Datasets as Primary Sources, Part II.

BIG news from Chronicling America!

The Library of Congress is excited to announce that the Chronicling America Historic Newspapers website is in the process of transitioning from the legacy Chronicling America interface to a new Chronicling America interface and back-end search infrastructure.

In the new system, the digitized newspapers will become part of a larger Library of Congress digital collections framework that recently received major upgrades to accommodate future growth and expansion of the collection. New website features include faceted browse options (refine searches by ethnicity, location, subject, language, etc.), improved image viewing, improved Advanced Search options, and more!

The new interface also allows users to browse digitized titles in a map. Uploads to the new interface are now automated so you may notice that there are more pages available in the new interface than the longstanding version of Chronicling America. Check out the new Research Guide on using Chronicling America to learn more.

New crowdsourced transcriptions

Over 100,000 crowdsourced transcriptions from the By the People American Creativity: Early Copyright Title Pages and Historical Legal Reports from the Law Library of Congress campaigns 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. A huge thanks to our By the People volunteers for enabling improved access and discovery of these collections!

What’s new onsite via Stacks?

New items are added every week into stacks.loc.gov – the Library’s primary onsite platform for accessing restricted digital content. To learn more about Stacks, check out this new video from our team: Access the Digital Stacks On-Site at the Library of Congress!

A few new titles available onsite via Stacks include You can’t lose ’em all: the year the Phillies finally won the World Series, Pumpkin: the curious history of an American icon, Skilletheads: a guide to collecting and restoring cast-iron cookware, The remaking of archival values, and When rock met disco: the story of how the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Kiss, Queen, Blondie, and more got their groove on in the me decade.

Please reach out to a librarian at ask.loc.gov with questions about accessing these materials.

Updates from the Web Archives

Since August, more than 500 new web archive records have been added into loc.gov. In addition, four web archive collections have been  made more discoverable to users: the State Government Websites Web Archive, Openly Available Serials Web Archive, Bosnian Political and Social Issues Web Archive, and the Singaporean Elections Web Archive.

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Leave us any questions or comments below and keep an eye out for our next edition!