In November, 2016, staff from the Library of Congress’s National Digital Initiatives division visited the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab as part of NDI’s efforts to explore data librarianship, computational research and digital scholarship at other libraries and cultural institutions. Like many university digital labs, the DSL is based in the library, which DSL …
This is a guest post by Nicole Contaxis, Data Catalog Coordinator at NYU Health Sciences Library. You can email her at [email protected]. An increasing number of publishers and grant-funding organizations are requiring researchers to share their data, so libraries and other institutions are creating tools and strategies to support researchers in this effort. To meet …
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 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 …
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 …
The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Audio-Visual Working Group is pleased to announce that its new draft publication, Embedding Metadata in Scanned Motion Picture Film Files: Guideline for Federal Agency Use of DPX Files, is available for public comment. The Digital Picture Exchange format typically stores image-only data from scanned motion picture film or born-digital …
Researchers, of varying technical abilities, are increasingly applying data science tools and methods to digital collections. As a result, new ways are emerging for processing and analyzing the digital collections’ raw material — the data. For example, instead of pondering one single digital item at a time – such as a news story, photo or …
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 …