In a recent post, Lauren Algee (Library of Congress) highlights the Library of Congress’s new crowdsourcing platform, crowd.loc.gov. Crowd.loc.gov invites the public to volunteer to transcribe (type) and tag with keywords digitized images of text materials from the Library’s collections. Volunteers will journey through history first-hand and help the Library while gaining new skills – ...

Emma Clarke (Peter Lang Publishers) has contributed a post on the International Open Access Week website discussing the adoption of open access (OA) publishing in Latin America. She notes that, The popularity of OA in Latin America is soaring. Scholars in the region understand the importance of making their research accessible to all, especially since ...

Jim McGrath (Brown University) has posted an extended version of a talk he gave at the 2018 Digital Library Federation Forum to his website. The talk, entitled “Hyperlocal Histories and Digital Collections,” examines collecting, curating, and preserving local history in conjunction with digital projects. McGrath opens by describing how he became attached to the term ...

Christian Howard (University of Virginia) details her work on using Twitter for literary research in a recent blog post. With her collaborator Alyssa Collins, Howard uses Python to scrape and visualize Twitter data about the usage of the term #twitterature. #twitterature became an increasingly global term between 2011 and 2017, with a noticeable contraction in ...

In a blog post for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), SPARC Director of Open Education Nicole Allen outlines the extension of the Open Textbook Pilot, first established in March 2018. The bill, which will likely be signed into law in the next few days, provides “grants to colleges and universities to expand ...

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 ...

HathiTrust has announced the extension of their non-consumptive research tools to copyrighted materials, expanding researchers ability to explore and data mine the complete 16.7-million-item HathiTrust corpus. From the announcement: This work has been several years in the making. A primary goal of HathiTrust is to enable the widest possible lawful research and educational uses of the ...

Sarah Bond (University of Iowa) has written a blog post reflecting on “the ways in which digital humanities projects can be used to amplify, to visualize, and to give agency to underrepresented groups.” Bond asks “How can digital humanities contribute to social justice?,” and goes on to provide examples of DH projects that explicitly seek ...

Late last week, the IMLS announced 45 grants (totaling $8,155,005) to libraries and other information organizations. These include awards to many digitally-inflected projects including The Democratic Knowledge Project at Harvard University, The Trustees of Indiana University’s Shared BigData-Gateway for Research Libraries, and The Digital Library Federation (DLF) and HBCU Library Alliance. Information on all of the ...

Sarah Bond (University of Iowa) has written a blog post reflecting on a recent news item she reported in Hyperallergic discussing the proposed addition of over 2,000 hieroglyphs into Unicode. In “The Gospel of Unicode: Digital Love Letter(s) and Art Through Numbers,” Bond gives a brief introduction into the development of Unicode and its use ...