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This year libraries and cultural institutions around the nation are celebrating America’s 250th birthday. The 225-year-old Library of Congress is almost as old as the country itself and this year we’ve joined forces with the Smithsonian Institution to find new stories about America’s founding in our treasure trove of records and artifacts. The collaboration, called Revolution […]
The Library of Congress is seeking our next Innovator in Residence to start in September 2026! We will fund an individual up to $90,000 per year, for a maximum of two years, to create a transformative digital work with Library of Congress collections for the American people and to serve as an ambassador for the Library. This is a mostly remote residency experience […]
In 2018, the Library launched the very popular Free To Use and Reuse Sets, where staff curate thematic sets of items from our digital collections that are either in the public domain, have no known copyright restrictions or have been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. The public is not only free to […]
We are delighted to introduce Victoria (Tori) Scheppele, a Library Technician in the Prints & Photographs Division who has joined us temporarily to work on the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) initiative. Victoria Scheppele. Tori is working on the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) initiative. The CCHC initiative is supported by […]
Before I joined LC Labs, I was an English teacher. In my classroom, the word “derivative” had a negative connotation. To be derivative was to be overly indebted to another idea and thus to lack ingenuity and creativity. When applied to datasets, however, “derivatives” abound. In fact, as you’ll see, derivative datasets sometimes serve a […]
October 2021 LC LABS LETTERA Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Our Projects Collective Wisdom Workshops build toward crowdsourcing research agenda On October 20 and 21, LC Labs staff co-hosted two days of workshops for crowdsourcing practitioners at cultural heritage organizations. This event was the penultimate activity of […]
August 2021 LC LABS LETTERA Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Our Projects 2021 Innovator in Residence Speculative Annotation tool now live 2021 Innovator in Residence Courtney McClellan and the LC Labs team are proud to announce the launch of Speculative Annotation a public art project designed for […]
In a recent post, I interviewed Team Digivision about their work designing a conceptual solution for using 1000 PPTs derived from the Library’s web archives. We pick up part II of the design sprint series by interviewing Team “Datamagination,” the second group of interns that participated in this summer’s design sprint in LC Labs. Before […]
This summer, the Digital Strategy Directorate, home to LC Labs, hosted seven interns working on projects to broaden the reach and potential impact of our initiatives. This is the first of two interviews with the 2021 summer cohort discussing a group activity they undertook in teams. In this post, I sit down with Emily Zerrenner, […]
July 2021 LC LABS LETTERA Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Our Projects LC Labs publishes “Library of Congress Digital Scholarship Research Guide” Have you ever wanted to use digital Library of Congress materials but weren’t quite sure where to start? Well then, we have just the guide […]
June 2021 LC LABS LETTERA Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Welcome, CCHC researchers! Funded with a 2019 $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) initiative aims to better serve research and creative uses of Library of Congress […]
April 2021 LC LABS LETTER A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Our Projects Talk back to history through Speculative Annotation (launching soon) The 2021 Innovator in Residence project, Speculative Annotation, is launching soon! In a recent blog post, Innovator Courtney McClellan shared more about the artistic process behind curating the items […]
November 2020 LC LABS LETTERA Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Our Projects It’s not too late: apply to be a CCHC researcher today! The call for researchers to work with Library collections at scale as part of the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) project is […]
This is a guest post by Chad Conrady, Archives Specialist in the Manuscript Division. Alongside Senior Archives Specialist Kathleen O’Neill, Chad is a 2020 Staff Innovator working on the project Born Digital Access Now! In previous blog posts, Chad and Kathleen have shared publicly about their project, whose central aim is to research and understand […]
October 2020 LC LABS LETTERA Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team And the Winner Is… Our Director of Digital Strategy, Kate Zwaard, was awarded a 2020 Theodore Roosevelt (Teddy) Government Leadership Award for her leadership in expanding the Library’s use of technology and encouraging deeper exploration and discovery […]
Kathleen O’Neill is a 2020 Staff Innovator with LC Labs and a Senior Archives Specialist in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. She’s shared about Born Digital Access Now!, her Staff Innovator project, in previous posts. In this post, she discusses her analysis of the various file formats in the Manuscript Division’s born-digital […]
September 2020 A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Projects The Newspaper Navigator Search Interface has launched! Breaking news! You can now visit //news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/search to interactively browse over 1.5 million historic photos from the Chronicling America database of digitized newspapers. Innovator in Residence Ben Lee built this application […]
On September 15, 2020, the Library of Congress announced the release of Newspaper Navigator, an experimental web application which allows members of the public to visually browse 1.5 million photographs from Chronicling America using machine learning. Read more about the design and features of the project below or jump straight to the newly launched application […]
This post was originally featured on the Minerva’s Kaleidoscope blog for kids and families. We’re excited and grateful to be able to re-share about this opportunity to experience Citizen DJ at the virtual National Book Festival next week! Citizen DJ is an application that allows anyone with access to a web browser to explore thousands […]
August 2020 A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Job Announcements WE’RE HIRING! The Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is seeking an Innovation Specialist (GS-12) to work with our curators and reference librarians supporting reference questions that require data […]
