In September, the Library hosted a Library Carpentry workshop to help library staff develop advanced digital skills and explore tools useful for managing digital collections and metadata. Building on the Library’s previous Software Carpentry workshop, the 2018 workshop presented an opportunity for us to explore the growing “Library Carpentry” curriculum. This effort, which adopts the …
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 …
On April 16th and 17th, National Digital Initiatives in partnership with DC Public Library hosted the Memory Lab Network Bootcamp at the Library of Congress. The Memory Lab Network – a cohort of 7 urban, rural, and tribal library systems – will build digitization stations and teach classes through an IMLS grant to support personal …
The following is a guest post from Library of Congress Labs Innovation Intern, Aditya Jain. While exploring the possibilities of digital collections, Aditya created @newspaperbot. Below he shares his process, some of the challenges he encountered, along with the code. Due to updates related to Twitter’s API, this bot is no longer functional. The Chronicling …
We’ve been delighted to have Library of Congress Innovator-in-Residence Jer Thorp with us since October. During the first three months of his residency he has connected with staff, visited collections, and explored forms of data to make better sense the inner workings of the Library. Jer has been weaving together those threads with experiments and …
Library of Congress Innovator-in-Residence, Jer Thorp, has started diving into the collections at the Library. We’ve rounded up some of his activities in October and how he is sharing his process in this post. Jer has created a “text-based exploration of Library of Congress @librarycongress‘ MARC records, specifically of ~9M books & the names of …
On Saturday, 23 September 2017, the LC Labs team joined representatives from cultural heritage organizations, archives, libraries, and historical organizations for DC History for All: Volunteer Fair. The event matched dozens of interested volunteers with opportunities to preserve Washington, D.C. history. There are many cultural heritage and historical organizations located in D.C. that invite the …
Starting this week, acclaimed data artist Jer Thorp began his tenure as the 2017 Library of Congress Innovator-in-Residence. He will spend six months with the National Digital Initiatives team exploring the Library’s digital collections and creating an art piece that will be displayed in the Library’s public spaces. Jer Thorp is an artist and educator …
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 …
