Category Archives: oa.loc

Law Library of Congress and Government Publishing Office Digitize Records of Congress, Release First Selected Volumes Online | Library of Congress

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“The Law Library of Congress, in collaboration with the U.S. Government Publishing Office, has digitized 287 volumes of the United States Congressional Serial Set and made them available on the Library’s website.

The release is part of a decade-long partnership to digitize more than 15,000 volumes of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set — the reports and documents of the House and Senate, including proposed legislation, committee reports and issues under investigation — dating back to the first volume published in 1817. The Law Library and GPO began this multi-year digitization effort two years ago….”

Library of Congress Releases Data for Free Download and Discovery | Library of Congress

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“The Library of Congress announced today its third release of records in its online catalog for free bulk download for research and discovery. The release supports the Library’s effort to continuously expand open access to its vast collections.

This MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging Records) release surpasses previous releases and adds more than 200,000 new records to the existing 25 million record database.

Releases of MARC data uniquely exhibit the Library’s mission. They enable researchers to engage with the unparalleled and rich source metadata at the Library, inspire discovery of Library collections and provide resources to inform future discovery within the Library and data communities….”

Library of Congress and Harvard University Form Historic Collaboration on Islamic Law Collections | Library of Congress

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“The Library of Congress and Harvard Law School have initiated an unprecedented, multifaceted joint collaboration to identify, select and assess the copyright status of materials focusing on national legal gazettes.

The effort, initially set for three years, will coordinate access to, knowledge-sharing, and legal analysis of Library of Congress’ collections related to Islamic law, including national legal gazettes, manuscripts and other materials. It will also improve a reader or researcher’s ability to search those sources, using new data science tools and faceted searches tailored to Islamic collections. The joint objective is to expand scholarly analysis of and greater public access to relevant legal materials….”

Update: 1201 Exemption to Enable Text and Data Mining Research | Authors Alliance

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“Authors Alliance, joined by the Library Copyright Alliance and the American Association of University Professors, is petitioning the Copyright Office for a new three-year exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) as part of the Copyright Office’s eighth triennial rulemaking process. If granted, our proposed exemption would allow researchers to bypass technical protection measures (“TPMs”) in order to conduct text and data mining (“TDM”) research on literary works that are distributed electronically and motion pictures. Recently, we met with representatives from the U.S. Copyright Office to discuss the proposed exemption, focusing on the circumstances in which access to corpus content is necessary for verifying algorithmic findings and ways to address security concerns without undermining the goal of the exemption….”

Speculative Annotation Invites Public to Interact with Digitized Collections at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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“Students, educators and learners of all ages are invited to interact with select items in the Library’s collections with the launch of Speculative Annotation, the latest experiment from LC Labs.

Created by artist and 2021 Innovator in Residence Courtney McClellan, Speculative Annotation is an open-source dynamic web application and public art project. The app presents a unique mini collection of free-to-use items from the Library for students, teachers and learners to annotate through captions, drawings and other types of mark-making. As a special feature for Speculative Annotation users, the app includes a collection of informative, engaging annotations from Library experts and resources on the Library’s website….”

Brewster Kahle named to the Library of Congress’ Copyright Public Modernization Committee – Internet Archive Blogs

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“The Library of Congress announced that Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, has been named to the Copyright Public Modernization Committee (CPMC), with a mission to help modernize the technology-related aspects of the U.S. Copyright Office. More specifically the CPMC will support “the development of the new Enterprise Copyright System (ECS), which includes the Office’s registration, recordation, public records, and licensing IT applications, and will be encouraged to help spread awareness of the Library’s development efforts more broadly.”

The thirteen member panel is composed of leaders from the library and university worlds along with representatives from trade organizations representing the recording and publishing industries, and corporate giants Amazon and Warner Media. Kahle, who holds a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, brings decades of experience in digital library issues, and is an inaugural member of the Internet Hall of Fame.  “I am excited to collaborate to help modernize the  U.S. Copyright Office.  Let’s see how far we can get,” says Kahle….”

Free to Use and Reuse: The Photographs of Bernard Gotfryd | Library of Congress Blog

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“The photographs of Bernard Gotfryd, now free for anyone to use from the Library’s collections, are a remarkable resource of late 20th-century American pop-culture and political life, as he was a Newsweek staff photographer based in New York for three decades.

In his work, you’ll find film stars such as Dustin Hoffman on the set of “Midnight Cowboy,” novelists, painters, singers and songwriters, politicians at podiums and any number of passionate people at street protests. Gotfryd, who died in 2016 at the age of 92, left the bulk of his photographs to the Library and designated that his copyright should expire at his death….”

Renowned Digital Humanities Researchers Begin Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud | Library of Congress

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“Three renowned researchers in digital humanities and computer science are joining forces with the Library of Congress on three inaugural Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud projects, exploring how biblical quotations, photographic styles and “fuzzy searches” reveal more about the collections in the world’s largest Library than first meets the eye.

Supported by a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded in 2019, the initiative combines cutting edge technology with the Library’s vast collections to support digital humanities research at scale. These three outside researchers will collaborate with subject matter experts and technology specialists at the Library of Congress to experiment in pursuit of answers that can only be achieved with collections and data at scale. These collaborations will enable research on questions previously difficult to address due to technical and data constraints. Expanding the skills and knowledge necessary for this work will enable the Library to support emerging methods in cloud-based computing research such as machine learning, computer vision, interactive data visualization, and other areas of digital humanities and computer science research. As a result, the Library and other cultural heritage institutions may build upon or adapt these approaches for their own use in improving access to text and image collections….”

Federal Register :: Announcement of Copyright Public Modernization Committee

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“The Library of Congress is convening a public committee to enhance communication and provide a public forum for the technology-related aspects of the U.S. Copyright Office’s modernization initiative. At this time, the Library is announcing that it will accept applications from qualified members of the public to serve on this committee. The scope of contributions made by the committee are limited to the specific topics set forth in this notice. Membership will be on a volunteer basis, with the expectation of in-person or virtual participation at two open forums a year at the member’s own expense….”

Library’s Web Archiving: COVID-19 Challenges | Library of Congress Blog

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“The COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges to the Library’s web archiving program not seen since the terrorist attacks against the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. The program had just begun in 2000, and the Library rushed to pull together online material from all across the country after the attacks. The resulting archive is part of the Library’s permanent collection.

Since then, the web archiving program has collected an enormous amount of materials (more than two petabytes of data and over 21 billion files) primarily in event or theme-based collections that are proposed, approved and set up in a process that can take several weeks to complete….

The team has been highly selective regarding new nominations, with a primary focus on the U.S. The team is also planning for the eventual public launch of the collection, which has a working title of the “Coronavirus Web Archive.” Since the Library’s web archives program observes a one-year embargo on harvested content, that collection will likely be made fully available in the latter half of 2021. Small parts of it will be available before the full launch….”

Library of Congress Completes Digitization of 23 Early Presidential Collections | Library of Congress

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“The Library of Congress has completed a more than two decade-long initiative to digitize the papers of nearly two dozen early presidents. The Library holds the papers of 23 presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, all of which have been digitized and are now available online.

The Library plans to highlight each presidential collection on social media in the weeks leading up to the next presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021….

With the digitization of papers from Presidents Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Grover Cleveland and Coolidge, the Library’s complete set of presidential collections is now available online for the first time….”

Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud

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“The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. One of the missions of Library of Congress’ Labs (Labs) at the Library of Congress (Library) is to enable transformational experiences between the Library’s digital collections and the American people.

 

LC Labs (Labs), a division in the Digital Strategy Directorate in the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the Library of Congress, was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant titled “Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud” to test a cloud-based approach for interacting with digital collections as data, supporting those researchers who are creatively applying emerging styles of research to Library material. In collaboration with subject matter experts and IT specialists at the Library, the Library is seeking to award contracts to up to four research experts (Research Experts) to experiment with solutions to problems that can only be explored at scale. See attached BAA for details about this opportunity….”

No Need to Hold these Horses: Announcing New Free to Use and Reuse Set | Picture This: Library of Congress Prints & Photos

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“In the Library’s latest Free to Use and Reuse set of images drawn from the collections, the focus is on the horse, and all the myriad ways these noble animals have been part of our lives, including sports, recreation, agriculture, transportation, and so on….

Explore the entire set of Free to Use and Reuse: Horses, as well as additional sets of images from the Library of Congress. …”

More Open eBooks: Routinizing Open Access eBook Workflows | The Signal

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“We are excited to share that anyone anywhere can now access a growing online collection of contemporary open access eBooks from the Library of Congress website. For example, you can now directly access books such as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and Youjeong Oh’s Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place from the Library of Congress website. All of these books have been made broadly available online in keeping with the intent of their creators and publishers, which chose to publish these works under open access licenses.

A key objective of the Library of Congress digital collecting plan is the development and implementation of an acquisitions program for openly available content. We have previously discussed a number of open access book projects, including open access Latin American books, and open access children’s books. Significantly, the Library of Congress has long been receiving print copies of open access books through multiple routine acquisition streams. These openly licensed works can be made much more broadly accessible in their digital form.

These books are the result of a pilot effort of the Digital Content Management Section (DCM). DCM staff, in collaboration with the Collection Development Office (CDO), identified books available through Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) of which the Library already holds a copy in print. DOAB is a digital directory that provides access to academic peer-reviewed books available under open access licenses….”

LD4L

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“With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Linked Data for Production Phase 2 (LD4P2) partners (Cornell University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science), in collaboration with the Library of Congress and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), are building a pathway for the cataloging community to begin shifting to linked data to describe library resources. LD4P2 builds on the foundational work of Linked Data for Production (LD4P) Phase 1 and Linked Data for Libraries Labs (LD4L Labs). More on LD4P2 Project Background and Goals….”