As a part of Library of Congress Labs release last week, the National Digital Initiatives team launched Beyond Words. This pilot crowdsourcing application was created in collaboration with the Serial and Government Publications Division and the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) at the Library of Congress. In our first week and a half, …
When hosting workshops, such as Software Carpentry, or events, such as Collections As Data, our National Digital Initiatives team made a discovery—there is an appetite among librarians for hands-on computational experience. That’s why we created an inclusive hackathon, or a “hack-to-learn,” taking advantage of the skills librarians already have and paring them with programmers to …
This is a guest post from Elizabeth England, National Digital Stewardship Resident, and Eric Hanson, Digital Content Metadata Specialist, at Johns Hopkins University. Elizabeth: In my National Digital Stewardship Residency at Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries, I am responsible for a digital preservation project addressing a large backlog (about 50 terabytes) of photographs documenting the university’s …
Mass digitization — coupled with new media, technology and distribution networks — has transformed what’s possible for libraries and their users. The Library of Congress makes millions of items freely available on loc.gov and other public sites like HathiTrust and DPLA. Incredible resources — like digitized historic newspapers from across the United States, the personal papers …
This is a guest post collectively written by the XFR Collective (pronounced “transfer collective”), a grass-roots digitization and digital-preservation organization. They work with artists and media creators to rescue and preserve digital works, utilizing open, free platforms — such as the Internet Archive — for long-term preservation and access. We featured them in two previous …
This is a guest post by Elizabeth England, a resident in the National Digital Stewardship Residency program. In recent years, a few news stories focused on the use of digital tools in preserving cultural heritage three-dimensional objects, stories such as the printed reconstruction of the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra, Syria and the construction of a …
This is a guest post by Ted Westervelt, section head in the Library of Congress’s US Arts, Sciences & Humanities Division. Strange as it now seems, it was not that long ago that scholarship was not digital. Writing a dissertation in the 1990s was done on a computer and took full advantage of the latest …
This is a guest post from Stefanie Ramsay, a Digital Collections Librarian at Swarthmore College, which is part of the TriCollege Libraries consortium. Consortium arrangements among libraries and archives are an increasingly popular strategy for managing the large amount of digital content they produce and for providing increased access to these important materials. Luckily for …
