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 still live! We anticipate selecting up to four research projects from three Program Areas. Submit a 2-page concept paper by 12:00 pm EST on November 30, 2020 to be considered.

As a reminder:

• Proposed budgets should not exceed $77,500.
• The research experiments will take place between May 1, 2021 and January 31, 2022.
• See the full posting on beta.SAM.gov for any updated details and instructions for submission. This page also contains a revised set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for Interested Researchers and a public record of questions and answers about the project.

You can also read more about how the project plans to inform the design of possible service models in the GLAM sector in this recent article.

Announcing Speculative Annotation: the 2021 Innovator in Residence project

LC Labs is pleased to announce visual, research-based artist Courtney McClellan as the 2021 Innovator in Residence! McClellan’s project, Speculative Annotation, will invite Americans to creatively engage with a curated collection of free to use items from the Library’s vast treasure chest centered on the question: how does the past influence the future?

With just a web browser, Speculative Annotation will present items from Library collections for students, teachers or any users to annotate through captions, drawings and other types of visual expression. Working with Library curators, grade school students and teachers in the classroom, McClellan’s project will encourage students to engage firsthand wit primary sources – and support conversations between students and educators about these historical objects.

Hot Off the (Digital) Press: New Posts on the Signal

• “An Archivist’s Perspective on Legacy Files”: a closer look at how 2020 Staff Innovator and archivist Chad Conrady tackles the challenge of outdated or legacy files that are no longer compatible with contemporary operating systems or software.
• “LC for Robots in Action”: a story about reference librarian Elizabeth Brown and Prof. Derek Miller of Harvard University using LC for Robots resources to access Library of Congress digital collections for a quantitative history of Broadway in the twentieth century.
• “Nominations sought for the U.S. Federal Government Domain End of Term 2020 Web Archive”: a call for members of the public to submit their nominations for any federal government website they’d like to see archived by the Library’s Web Archives team. It’s also the 20th Anniversary of Web Archiving this year–join the conversation on Twitter using #WebArchiveWednesday.
• “Analyzing the Born-Digital Archive” : a deep dive into the thousands (yes, thousands!) of file extensions contained in the Manuscript Division’s born-digital holdings by 2020 Staff Innovator Kathleen O’Neill.

Curio

• It’s the 20th Anniversary of the Veteran’s History Project!
• Check out the latest edition of the LC Magazine.
• The Prints and Photographs Division just released 540,000 high-quality architectural photographs, more than 2,300 of which are readily available online. What’s more–they did so in only two years! Read how staff invested over 5,000 hours to get this collection ready for research.
• By the People has something for everyone: get transcribing today with Frederick Hockley, various Suffragettes, Walt Whitman, Mary Church Terrell, and more!

Tell Us More

What else do you want to know about our work this month? Email us at [email protected] with questions we can answer in next month’s newsletter!

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For more information about LC Labs, visit us at https://labs.loc.gov/

Questions? Contact LC Labs at [email protected]