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Category: Inside the Library

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Inside, Inside Baseball: A Look at the Construction of the Dataset Featuring the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress Digital Collections

Posted by: Abbey Potter

This is a guest blog post by visiting scholar archivist Julia Hickey who is on a professional development assignment from the Defense Media Activity to the Library of Congress Labs team. Julia has been helping us prepare for and build out a visualization of collection data for our Inside Baseball event. This post was also …

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User Experience (UX) Design in Libraries: An Interview with Natalie Buda Smith

Posted by: Jaime Mears

  Natalie Buda Smith is the User Experience (UX) Team supervisor at the Library of Congress, and most recently worked with NDI to design the beautiful graphic for our Collections as Data conference. Her team has been busy redesigning Loc.gov, and the new homepage is set to debut Tuesday, Nov.1st. We caught up over coffee …

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Co-Hosting a Datathon at the Library of Congress

Posted by: Jaime Mears

On June 14 and 15, the Library of Congress hosted Archives Unleashed 2.0, a web archive “datathon” (otherwise known as a “hackathon,” but apparently any term with the word “hack” in it might sound a bit menacing) in which teams of researchers used a variety of analytical tools to query web-archive data sets in the hopes of discovering some intriguing insights before their 48-hour deadline …

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Keeping Our Tools Sharp: Approaching the Annual Review of the Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement

Posted by: Erin Engle

The following post is by Ted Westervelt, head of acquisitions and cataloging for U.S. Serials in the Arts, Humanities & Sciences section at the Library of Congress. Since first launching its Recommended Formats Statement (then called Recommended Format Specifications in 2014), the Library of Congress has committed to treating it as an important part of …

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ODF: The Open Document Format

Posted by: Erin Engle

The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager at the Library of Congress. During December 2015, the Library’s Format Sustainability website added descriptions of eleven members of the Open Document Format family, aka OpenDocument and ODF. These eleven join a number of other format descriptions mounted in 2015, many …

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APIs: How Machines Share and Expose Digital Collections

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

Kim Milai, a retired school teacher, was searching on ancestry.com for information about her great grandfather, Amohamed Milai, when her browser turned up something she had not expected: a page from the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site displaying a scan of the Harrisburg Telegraph newspaper from March 13, 1919. On that page was a story …

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Acquiring at Digital Scale: Harvesting the StoryCorps.me Collection

Posted by: Erin Engle

This post was originally published on the Folklife Today blog, which features folklife topics, highlighting the collections of the Library of Congress, especially the American Folklife Center and the Veterans History Project.  In this post, Nicole Saylor, head of the American Folklife Center Archive, talks about the StoryCorps.me mobile app and interviews Kate Zwaard and …