The following is a guest post by Josh Levy, Historian of Science and Technology in the Library’s Manuscript Division. What’s a historian to do with a born digital file? On Christmas Day, 1854, between family gatherings and fretting over the cost of living in Washington, engineer Montgomery Meigs was notating his plans to build a […]
Last year, LC Labs worked with partners across the Library and outside its walls to advance the Digital Strategy. Here’s a look back at some of our work on the strategy’s goals of opening the treasure chest, connecting, and investing in our future, and a preview of this year’s plans. In the coming year, we […]
January’s monthly newsletter from the LC Labs team.
The following is a repost from the blog Of the People. The author is Kate Zwaard, Director of Digital Strategy. You may have seen the news about the Library’s exciting new program Of the People, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which will allow us to do more to connect our collections, staff, and services to […]
Today’s guest post is from Grace Thomas, Senior Digital Collections Specialist on the Library of Congress Web Archiving Team. You can read more about the Web Archiving Team right here on the Signal. In the web archiving community, we build the plane and fly it simultaneously. While this pattern is present in most disciplines, web […]
Walk the streets of any U.S. city today, and you might come across historic markers or masonry etchings indicating what the buildings used to be. It is always fascinating to learn what our neighborhoods, cities, and towns used to be —factories turned residences, street names changed, the places and spaces our predecessors lived, ate, and […]
In today’s post, Sam Schireson interviews a By the People volunteer, Judith, who has gone above and beyond! By the People is a crowdsourced transcription program launched in 2018 at the Library of Congress. Volunteer-created transcriptions are used to make digitized collections more accessible and discoverable on loc.gov. You can read our other Volunteer Vignette on the Signal […]
December’s monthly newsletter from the LC Labs team.
Experimenting toward the Digital Strategy In LC Labs we work collaboratively across the Library of Congress, and with external partners, to advance and the agency’s Digital Strategy. We do this through experimentation, engagement and research. We try approaches and explore technologies that could help us connect with users, share our resources in new ways, and […]
A reflection on the 2020 Staff Innovator detail from an LC Labs team member, shared in the hopes that some of the lessons we learned from this cross-institutional partnership may be applicable to other institutions and interesting to our readers!