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Category: Tools and Infrastructure

A New Resource to Explore Library of Congress Transcription Datasets

Posted by: Carlyn Osborn

Today’s guest post is from Madeline Goebel, a Digital Collections Specialist at the Library of Congress. As a reader of the Signal, you may already be familiar with By the People, the Library of Congress’s crowdsourcing program that allows volunteers to transcribe, review, and tag digitized pages from the Library’s collections. Further, you may already know …

Black and white photograph of woman with pin curls operating machinery in Baltimore.

Stayin’ Alive: How Community and Maintenance Support Digital Preservation

Posted by: Carlyn Osborn

Today’s guest post is from Genevieve Havemeyer-King, a Senior Digital Collections Specialist in the Digital Collections Management and Services Division. “Development is maintenance.” Brian Marick, “Agile Manifesto” co-author This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Digital Collections Management Compendium’s public debut on loc.gov. The Digital Collections Management and Services Division officially launched the Compendium …

Introducing the new EPUB reader for e-books at the Library of Congress

Posted by: Carlyn Osborn

Today’s guest post is from Kristy Darby, a Digital Collections Specialist at the Library of Congress. The Open Access Books Collection on loc.gov includes approximately 6,000 contemporary open access e-books covering a wide range of subjects, including history, music, poetry, technology, and works of fiction. All books in this collection were published under open access licenses, …

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

Fun with File Formats

Posted by: Carlyn Osborn

Today’s guest post is from Kate Murray, Marcus Nappier, and Liz Holdzkom of the Digital Collections Management & Services Division at the Library of Congress. Are you a file format fan? If you’re curious how to pronounce the still image format HEIF (spoiler alert: it rhymes with “beef”) or the difference between PDF/A-3 and PDF/A-4, …

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

Developing a New Digital Collections Strategy at the Nation’s Library

Posted by: Carlyn Osborn

Today’s guest post is from Joe Puccio, Collection Development Officer at the Library of Congress. Tremendous progress has been made by the Library of Congress in acquiring born-digital content as part of a coordinated strategy presented in its 2017 Digital Collecting Plan and previously reported in the Signal. With that plan now in its fifth …

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

PDF is Here to Stay: Archiving with the Portable Document Format

Posted by: Carlyn Osborn

Today’s guest post is from Kate Murray (Digital Projects Coordinator, Digital Collections Management and Services Division, Library of Congress), Duff Johnson (Executive Director, PDF Association / ISO Project Leader, ISO 32000), and Kevin De Vorsey (Senior Electronic Records Policy Analyst, Records Management Policy and Standards, National Archives and Records Administration). PDF in the Federal Archiving …