POST: Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has released its Digital Strategy, an accompaniment to the organization’s 2019-2023 strategic plan, Enriching the User Experience. The Strategy major goals include “throwing open the treasure chest, connecting, and investing in the future.”

In addition to pledging to “exponentially grow” the organization’s digital content, the Library of Congress plans to expand its technical capacity:

We will offer the training, tools, infrastructure, opportunities, and organizational support needed to enable staff to adapt to a changing information landscape. We can expose staff to new ways of working, for example, by encouraging our staff to collaborate with outside experts in digital-forward organizations. We will seek other creative ways to help our staff broaden their perspectives like peer mentoring and training, collaborative workspaces, and encouraging short-term assignments in different departments.

Technology investments will amplify the expertise of our staff and increase our impact. We will find efficiencies that give our staff more time to focus on their intellectual work rather than procedural steps. For example, copyright registration or collections processing might be streamlined through the use of emerging technologies such as computer vision, natural language process, and machine learning. These kind of emerging technologies can provide the basis for next-generation tools to help provide greater discoverability, and reduce the time needed to perform research and analysis.

dh+lib readers will also be interested in the document’s discussion of digital preservation, community engagement, and intellectual property.