The Library of Congress opened its catalogs to the world. Here’s why it matters

Library of Congress | Online catalog | Research

BY Melissa Levine, The Conversation  July 22, 2017 at 12:22 PM EDT

The Library of Congress has made 25 million digital catalog records available for anyone at no charge. Photo by Flickr user casajump

Imagine you wanted to find books or journal articles on a particular subject. Or find manuscripts by a particular author. Or locate serials, music or maps. You would use a library catalog that includes facts – like title, author, publication date, subject headings and genre.

That information and more is stored in the treasure trove of library catalogs.

It is hard to overstate how important this library catalog information is, particularly  as the amount of information expands every day. With this information, scholars and librarians are able to find things in a predictable way. That’s because of the descriptive facts presented in a systematic way in catalog records.

But what if you could also experiment with the data in those records to explore other kinds of research questions – like trends in subject matter, semantics in titles or patterns in the geographic source of works on a given topic?

Now it is possible. The Library of Congress has made 25 million digital catalog records available for anyone to use at no charge. The free data set includes records from 1968 to 2014. Read more...

Hayden, Marx in Conversation at NYPL

Public Libraries

By Lisa Peet on November 8, 2016

Carla Hayden and Tony Marx in conversation at NYPL
Photo credit: Chasi Annexy/The New York Public Library

On Halloween night, Friends and trustees of New York Public Library (NYPL) got a treat that didn’t require a costume: Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and NYPL President Tony Marx sat down together for a lively hour-long discussion of research, preservation, digitization, Hayden’s plans for the Library of Congress (LC), and the influence of Hamilton. The conversation was the first in a series of public programs over the next year highlighting the importance of archival research.

The event was held as part of the celebration of the reopening of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Rose Main Reading Room and Bill Blass Public Catalog Room. These had been closed since May 2014, when a plaster rosette fell from the Reading Room’s 52-foot ceiling in the middle of the night. After an inspection, the ceiling was deemed structurally sound, but NYPL decided to err on the side of caution and reinforce all of the decorative rosettes bordering the ceiling with steel cables, and at the same time to restore the mural on the ceiling of the Bill Blass room. The spaces reopened in October 2016 with a celebratory ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Sitting at the front of the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Trustees Room—hung with what Marx called “incredibly politically incorrect 400-year-old tapestries”—the two bantered briefly and then got down to business. “Why libraries?” asked Marx.

Hayden described her experiences with public libraries as a young patron and then a librarian, and her dawning realization of what sanctuaries they were for their constituents. Plus, she told Marx, “In the ’70s, when I was a baby librarian, what attracted me was the idea of information as power.”  Read more...

New Librarian of Congress Offers a History Lesson in Her Own Right

by Nicholas Fandod Drpy. 25, 3026

Carla D. Hayden was sworn in by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., center, on Wednesday as the new librarian of Congress. Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House, was at left. Credit Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press 

 

WASHINGTON — On the night in April 2015 that Baltimore went up in flames, Carla D. Hayden, the city’s chief librarian, was under pressure to board up a neighborhood library branch and wait out the violence triggered by the death of Freddie Gray after being injured in police custody.

But she had other ideas.

“I thought, what would that show?” Dr. Hayden said. “That we’re afraid?”

Instead, as a CVS drugstore across the street was looted and burned, and as the governor of Maryland declared a state of emergency, Dr. Hayden and her staff decided they would open their doors the next morning, welcoming in the weary public.

For Dr. Hayden, who was sworn in on Wednesday as the 14th librarian of Congress, the unrest was the test that clarified her values: Libraries are about far more than books.

“The people of that neighborhood protected that library,” Dr. Hayden said during a recent interview in her new office overlooking Capitol Hill. “There were young men who stood outside. It was such a symbol.”

At 64, Dr. Hayden is the first African-American and the first woman to lead the 216-year-old library, one of the world’s largest, and the nation’s leading repository of knowledge and culture. “To be the head of an institution that’s associated with knowledge and reading and scholarship when slaves were forbidden to learn how to read on punishment of losing limbs, that’s kind of something,’’ she said.

Appointed by President Obama, Dr. Hayden is the first new librarian of Congress since 1987, and brings with her another generation’s ideas about accessibility, technology and the role that libraries play in society.

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Her goal is to open to more Americans the riches of the Library of Congress, which has always balanced mixed loyalties — to members of Congress who look to it for impartial research, to scholars who live in its archives and, finally, to the public.

 

VHP at 15: Collections over the Years (Experiences War: Stories from the Veterans History Project(Library of Congress: loc.gov)

The Library of Congress' Veterans History Project is a great project and a wonderful way to honor those who have served. This Veterans Day, take some time to read their stories or consider helping to record the story of the veteran in your life.

The Library of Congress	Veterans History Project Home
In 2015, the Veterans History Project celebrates fifteen years of collecting the stories of America's war veterans. To commemorate the occasion, here we highlight 15 different collections, donated to us during the first five, ten, and fifteen years of VHP's existence. While these collections vary widely in scope, each fulfills VHP's mission of capturing the stories of veterans in their own words. Whether they were submitted to us in the early days of the project, or later on, these fifteen collections represent a mere fraction of the over 99,000 collections in the Veterans History Project archive--all of which communicate the experience of war. Five Years 2000-2005 Robert E. Cassidy  ARMY Korean War Audio Interview Thomas J. Hudner, Jr. NAVY Korean War Vietnam War  Video and Audio Interviews, Photos Herman F. Monoschein AIR FORCE World War II Korean War  Video Interview Martha Settle Putney WAAC World War II Video Interview Gary L. Villereal ARMY Vietnam War Video Interview Ten Years 2005-2010 Felmers O. Chaney ARMY World War II Video Interviews James E. Frolking ARMY AIR CORPS World War II Audio Interview, Memoir, Photos, Personal Correspondence James Noboru Miho ARMY Korean War Video Interviews Bernadette P. Miller ARMY Vietnam War Video Interview, Photos Lucius Byron Nash NAVY World War I Photos, Official Documents, Personal Correspondence Fifteen Years 2010-2015 Rollins Edwards ARMY World War II Audio Interview Adam Jordan Holt  ARMY Iraq War Audio Interview Kurt Chew-Een Lee  MARINE CORPS World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War Video Interview, Official Documents Elisa Raney NAVY Iraq War Video Interview, Photos Edwin Trawczynski ARMY Vietnam War Memoir, Photos, Personal Corredspondence
Other Collections of Interest: Robert Andraski Jason Brown Francis Galligan Henry Heimlich Jack Jones Laura J. Brautigam June Elizabeth McIntosh Logan Mehl-Laituri	Search the Veterans Database: Search by Keyword Browse by Last Name Browse by War/Military Branch Browse by State of Residence Browse by Race/Ethnicity   View ALL Stories: View ALL Stories in an Alphabetical List View ALL Stories by Theme
Playing the audio and video files - Building the digital collection - Copyright and restrictions - Credits
The Library of Congress            Legal | External Link Disclaimer   October 28, 2015	Veterans History Project Home Contact Us

http://www.loc.gov/vets/stories/ex-war-15years.html?loclr=twloc

Can We Create a National Digital Library? Robert Darnton

The following talk was given at the opening of a conference at Harvard on October 1 to discuss the possibility of creating a National Digital Library.

The purpose of this meeting is to discuss a question of vital importance to the cultural life of our country: Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.

Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDL would make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.

The ambition behind this project goes back to the founding of this country. Thomas Jefferson formulated it succinctly: “Knowledge is the common property of mankind.” He was right—in principle. But in practice, most of humanity has been cut off from the accumulated wisdom of the ages. In Jefferson’s day, only a tiny elite had access to the world of learning. Today, thanks to the Internet, we can open up that world to all of our fellow citizens. We have the technical means to make Jefferson’s dream come true, but do we have the will?

Read more...http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/28/can-we-create-national-digital-library/

The Internet can’t replace libraries: Why they matter more than ever in the age of Google - Salon.com

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

If you were airdropped, blindfolded, into a strange town and given

nothing but a bus ticket, to where would you ride that bus? You might be

surprised to learn that there’s only one good answer, and that’s the

public library. The library is the public living room, and if ever you

are stripped of everything private—money, friends and orientation—you

can go there and become a human again.

Of course, you don’t have to be homeless to use a library, but that’s the

point. You don’t have to be anyone in particular to go inside and stay

as long as you want, sit in its armchairs, read the news, write your

dissertation, charge your phone, use the bathroom, check your email,

find the address of a hotel or homeless shelter. Of all the institutions

we have, both public and private, the public library is the truest

democratic space.

The library’s value isn’t lost on us. A Gallup

survey from 2013 found that libraries are not just popular,

they’re extremely popular. Over 90 percent of Americans feel that

libraries are a vital part of their communities. Compare this to

53 percent for the police, 27 percent for public schools, and just 7

percent for Congress, and you’re looking at perhaps the greatest success

of the public sector. Read more...

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Unlocking Smartphones Rendered Illegal by Librarian's Baffling Decision

Unlocking Smartphones Rendered Illegal by Librarian's Baffling Decision

By Wayne Rash  |  Posted 2013-01-27

NEWS ANALYSIS: In yet another unintended consequence of some very flawed legislation, it’s now illegal to unlock any phone you purchase after Jan. 26.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has been the source of both controversy and consternation since it became law 15 years ago. Because of the DMCA, it became illegal to defeat the encryption on a DVD you purchased so you could watch a movie on your Linux computer.

 It became illegal to make a binary copy of a movie so you could watch it on your iPad. Now, because the Librarian of Congress has decided it to be this way, it’s now illegal to unlock phones purchased on or after Jan. 26.

 No doubt you’re asking yourself several questions. First, how is it that the DMCA has anything to do with phones? Second, why does the Librarian of Congress have anything to do with whether phone unlocking is illegal? We could go on from there. Read more...

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That plan to archive every tweet in the Library of Congress? Definitely still happening » Nieman Journalism Lab

That plan to archive every tweet in the Library of Congress? Definitely still happening » Nieman Journalism Lab

It has turned out to be quite an undertaking, but the Library plans to make good on its promise to America.

By Andrew Phelps

Email

A little more than two years ago, the Library of Congress announced it would preserve every public tweet, ever, for future generations. (Read more...)

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