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Category: Tools and Infrastructure

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Lowering barriers to using collections in an NDSR workshop with Shawn Averkamp

Posted by: Meghan Ferriter

This is a guest post by Charlotte Kostelic, National Digital Stewardship Resident with the Library of Congress and Royal Collection Trust for the Georgian Papers Programme. Her project focuses on exploring ways to optimize access and use among related digital collections held at separate institutions. This work has included a comparative analysis of international metadata …

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October Innovator-in-Residence Update

Posted by: Meghan Ferriter

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 …

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Introducing Beyond Words

Posted by: Meghan Ferriter

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, …

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Welcoming Jer Thorp as Innovator-in-Residence

Posted by: Abbey Potter

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 …

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Automating Digital Archival Processing at Johns Hopkins University

Posted by: Abbey Potter

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 …

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Centralized Digital Accessioning at Yale University

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

This is a guest post from Alice Prael, Digital Accessioning Archivist for Yale Special Collections at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. As digital storage technology progresses, many archivists are left with boxes of obsolete storage media, such as floppy disks and ZIP disks.  These physical storage media plague archives that …

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Recommendations for Enabling Digital Scholarship

Posted by: Abbey Potter

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 …

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Lots of Transfer Collectives Keep Cultural Memory Safe: The Importance of Community Audio/Visual Archiving

Posted by: Mike Ashenfelder

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 …