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Category: Tools and Infrastructure

Dark chinatown street, warmly lit, with vertical Library logo and seeing lost enclaves handwritten

Relational Reconstruction Toolkit Now Available

Posted by: Jaime Mears

This post was co-written with LC writer and editor Sahar Kazmi. Relational Reconstruction Toolkit Now Available For the past year, Innovator in Residence Jeffrey Yoo Warren worked with LC staff, collections and community members to develop an open source “relational reconstruction” toolkit to share his methodology and inspire the public to reconstruct other lost enclaves …

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Exploring Late 1800s Political Cartoons through Interactive Data Visualizations

Posted by: Jaime Mears

This is a guest blog post by Jeffrey Shen, a high-school Innovation Intern with LC Labs. Over the course of my three month internship with the LC Labs team, I developed a website/interactive data visualization which allows users to explore the late 1800s through political cartoons contained in the Cartoon Drawings collection. The main feature of …

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Iterative Collaboration at LC Labs

Posted by: Jaime Mears

The following is a repost of a blog post from the SAA’s Electronic Records Section: BloggERS! This post is part of the recent BloggERS series on “Collaborating Beyond the Archival Profession.”  The LC Labs team works to increase the impact of Library of Congress digital collections. This includes not only the 2,500,000+ items available on loc.gov, …

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Making a Newspaperbot

Posted by: Jaime Mears

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …