Top of page

Category: NDI

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

“Volun-peers” Help Liberate Smithsonian Digital Collections

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

The Smithsonian Transcription Center creates indexed, searchable text by means of crowdsourcing…or as Meghan Ferriter, project coordinator at the TC describes it, “harnessing the endless curiosity and goodwill of the public.” As of the end of the current fiscal year, 7,060 volunteers at the TC have transcribed 208,659 pages. The scope, planning and execution of the …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Wisdom is Learned: An Interview with Applications Developer Ashley Blewer

Posted by: Jaime Mears

  Ashley Blewer is an archivist, moving image specialist and developer who works at the New York Public Library. In her spare time she helps develop open source AV file conformance and QC software as well as standards such as Matroska and FFV1. She’s a three time Association of American Moving Image Archivists’ AV Hack …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Initiatives at the Library of Congress (Digital Preservation 2016 Talk)

Posted by: Jaime Mears

Here’s the text of the presentation I gave during the Initiatives panel at Digital Preservation 2016, held in collaboration with the DLF Forum on November 10, 2016. This presentation is about what the National Digital Initiatives division has been up to in FY16 and what’s coming up in FY17. For a report on the DLF Forum, see this Signal post. …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

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 …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

Data and Humanism Shape Library of Congress Conference

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

The presentations at the Library of Congress’ Collections As Data conference coalesced into two main themes: 1) digital collections are composed of data that can be acquired,  processed and displayed in countless scientific and creative ways and 2) we should always be aware and respectful that data is manipulated by — and derived from — people. …

Dozens of squares, each with its own individual color or shade, lined up in rows and columns

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 …