UpFront with NGS: LOC

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06 October 2017

Library of Congress Launches labs.loc.gov

Library of Congress Launches labs.loc.gov

From our friends at the Library of Congress! A new play space where digital collections will be further explored and that normally means greater access for researchers!

New Online Space Designed to Empower Exploration and Discovery of Digital Collections

The Library of Congress today launched labs.loc.gov, a new online space that will host a changing selection of experiments, projects, events and resources designed to encourage creative use of the Library’s digital collections. To help demonstrate the exciting discoveries that are possible, the new site will also feature a gallery of projects from data challenge winners and innovators-in-residence and blog posts and video presentations from leaders in the field.

“We already know the Library of Congress is the ultimate treasure chest, but with labs.loc.gov we are inviting explorers to help crack open digital discoveries and share the collections in new and innovative ways,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “Whether you’re tagging images from our digitized historic newspapers to help future visitors, or exploring the changing nature of democracy through the 25 million bibliographic records the Library recently made public, we are providing tools and inspiration that will lead to new uses and new ways of looking at the incredible materials here at the Library.”

The Library of Congress digital collections present immense potential for exploration. Labs will enable users at every level of technical knowledge to engage with these vast resources. Visitors can try experimental applications and crowdsourcing programs, and tutorials will provide a steppingstone for new computational discovery. Follow developments on Twitter at @LC_Labs.

“We’re excited to see what happens when you bring together the largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled with the power of 21st-century technology,” said Kate Zwaard, the chief of the Library’s National Digital Initiatives office, which manages the new website. “Every day, students, researchers, journalists and artists are using code and computation to derive new knowledge from library collections. With labs, we hope to create a community dedicated to using technology to expand what’s possible with the world’s creative and intellectual treasures.”

Some of the initial offerings are:

Crowdsourcing: Beyond Words

One of the first features on labs.loc.gov is Beyond Words, a website that invites the public to identify cartoons and photographs in historic newspapers and provide captions that will turn images into searchable data. This fun crowdsourcing program grows the data set of text available for researchers who use visualization, text analysis and other digital humanities methodologies to discover new knowledge from Chronicling America—the Library’s large collection of historic American newspapers. Beyond Words is available as a pilot project to help the Library of Congress learn more about what subsets of Library data researchers are interested in and to grow the Library’s capacity for crowdsourcing.

“What I like about crowdsourcing is it gives people a chance to discover hidden gems in the collection. You never know what you’ll find poking through old newspapers,” said Tong Wang, the IT specialist who created Beyond Words during a three-month pilot innovator-in-residence program.

Beyond Words will also generate public domain image galleries for scholarship and creative play. As this data set grows, educators, researchers and artists will be able to group image collections by time frame, such as identifying all historic cartoons appearing in World War I-era newspapers…

Read the remainder of the press release here.

For the Beyond Words element, I suggest that you click on “Get Started!” first where some important information about the project is given and there are a couple of really quick tutorials (they take seconds to view) on what is involved if you decide to participate.

Interested in participating, from the main page click on “Try It” and you will then get to pick what state interests you and opt to “mark” “transcribe” or learn more.

It’s that easy!

Visual elements in newspapers are so valuable and yet not able to be deciphered via Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Our involvement in marking and transcribing the visual elements of newspapers will greatly enhance the material we’ll be able to access from those newspapers already available to us via Chronicling America! Now instead of just stumbling across cartoons and photographs as we explore text-based entries, we’ll be able to search for them!

Do you plan to help with this crowdsourcing project?

What crowdsourcing projects have you already helped with?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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12 September 2017

Visualize Chronicling America News via US News Map

Visualize Chronicling America News via US News Map

Chronicling America (via the Library of Congress) is a wonderful FREE historic newspaper (1789-1925) archive with an invaluable US Newspaper Directory (1690-present). We have frequently blogged about Chronicling America.

Sometimes the way the search results are presented can be a bit challenging to interpret (especially if there are many “hits”) as you try to “focus” on the results that you think will be most important to your research. To help with this The Georgia Tech Research Institute and Ehistory.org at the University of Georgia created a means to search on Chronicling American and then visualize the results across space and time via their US News Map portal.

Enter a search term and you can see the found articles located on a map and then you can correlate articles by time using that controller.

Lisa Louise Cooke (Genealogy Gems) has a YouTube video illustrating how to use this website.

Slate, via The Vault article Interactive Map Lets You Track How 19th- and Early-20th-Century American Newspapers Covered Any Topic describes this wonderful new website also.

If visually processing information is for you, do check out this website! If you have not yet visited Chronicling America, you now have no excuse not to.

What result most surprised you?

Editor’s Note: Thanks to the Polish Genealogical Society of America (PGSA) for including a mention of this database and the video from Lisa Louise Cooke in the September 2017 edition of its Genealogy Notebook.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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19 July 2017

Founders Online – nitty gritty records of their lives might help document your 18th and early 19th century ancestors!

Founders Online – nitty gritty records of their lives might help document your 18th and early 19th century ancestors!

Recently, I keep finding myself looking at some document in the Founders Online website which then led me to The George Washington Financial Papers Project and I also visited the George Washington Papers (Library of Congress) all of which have digitized documents online. Guess what, all of our nation’s founders ran households (or households were run for them) and many of those records survive. Guess what, these men transacted business with locals just like everyone else. You may find through research that your ancestors were some of whom these individuals did business with and so are listed in their extant ledgers. The ledger I checked out included a name index in the front and depending which website you consult, you can search across the content that is digitized.

In researching some Virginia families I kept finding nuggets in the financial papers of George Washington. I’m sure the same is true for the other Founders.

Don’t assume that just because your ancestors may not have socialized with these gentlemen that they did not conduct business with them or their households.

Did your ancestors do business with a Founding Father?

How did your ancestors interact with the Founding Fathers?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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13 July 2017

RPAC Encourages Family Historians to Support NARA and Library of Congress

Created by cafecredit, https://www.flickr.com/photos/cafecredit/27432402060/sizes/l [CC-BY-ND-2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/)], via flickr

RPAC Encourages Family Historians to Support NARA and Library of Congress

As many of us celebrated the 4^th of July holiday last week, the Records Preservation and Access Committee (RPAC) posted a message reminding us that the 2018 federal budget is being worked on and that the two named great resources to genealogists could be at risk. Each of us can work to ensure that invaluable and venerable programs are recognized for all that they have done in terms of preserving our history and ensuring access to it and what is still needed to be done.

With thanks to Jan Alpert and Barbara Matthews.

On May 22, 2017, President Trump released more details about his proposed Fiscal Year 2018 budget. Overall there were cuts to many of the programs that genealogists regularly use. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is targeted for a $16.6 million reduction in addition to the elimination of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), an archival grant making arm of the National Archives which provides local and state funding in the preservation of essential historical materials making them more accessible to the public. Since 1964 NHPRC has provided grants to every state and you can view a detailed list for the last thirty years at https://www.archives.gov/nhprc/projects/states-territories. When the NARA budget is cut the hours at the Washington D.C., College Park, Maryland, and Regional Archives are usually reduced. As staff cuts are made to meet the budget, our fees are often increased and the delivery time is extended for document requests. Genealogists are the largest customer base of the National Archives. If we don’t support NARA, who will?

The Library of Congress is slated to receive a $56 million increase in the FY 2018 proposed Trump budget. In addition to the library being a world-class research facility, genealogists also are benefitting from Chronicling America which is digitizing early American newspapers from 1836 to 1922 and digitizing the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of cities across the United States which have survived. If your state newspapers are being digitized, it is likely in partnership with the Library of Congress. The budget negotiations will continue for months, so although the Library of Congress is well positioned in the Trump proposed budget, funding could be reduced before the final budget is approved. Let’s not take that chance.

As genealogists, we need to support the funding of projects which provide digitization and online access to historical documents. We have the most impact if we write our Congressional Representatives. On the RPAC website http://www.fgs.org/rpac we have provided a copy of this article with links to sample letters you can send in support of NARA, NHPRC, and/or the Library of Congress. With each sample letter we have provided a chart showing the actual FY 2016 and FY 2017 funding in comparison to the proposed FY 2018 budget.

SampleLettertoCongressFY18NARA+NHPRC (002)

SampleLetterFY18LOCChronAmerSanborn (002)

If RPAC is new to you, check out the About RPAC page.

What other federal budget items could directly or indirectly affect genealogical research?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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12 July 2017

1926 Polish Declarations of Admiration and Friendship for the United States Now Digitized and Accessible on Library of Congress Website

Schoolchildren from Deszno, Sanok, an ancestral village for my ancestors,
https://www.loc.gov/resource/pldec.073/?sp=71

1926 Polish Declarations of Admiration and Friendship for the United States Now Digitized and Accessible on Library of Congress Website

Though my immigrant ancestors had already relocated to the U.S. by 1910, I know that family remained in their communities until at least the end of WWII. At which time, some were forcibly relocated to the Ukraine.

That’s why this new online addition caught my eye. I wondered if anyone bearing my ancestor’s surname, living in Poland, signed a declaration. I did find an entry for Deszno, though, no familiar surnames were listed. I was less successful with Pietrusza (aka Wola Pietrusza) … and, I didn’t look too hard.

You definitely want to do the following.

First, read the blog post, Ahead of July 4, a Unique Birthday Card to America Goes Online.

Second, review the About this Collection page.

Third, check out the place names index created by the Library of Congress staff. This index gets you exactly to which volume with page numbers where you will find the list(s) for your target community.

Did you find any of your extended family? If yes, you now have their signature, something you may not have had before!

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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11 July 2017

Founding Era of DC as Seen Through the Eyes (and Papers) of Women

Founding Era of DC as Seen Through the Eyes (and Papers) of Women

The Library of Congress recently put online two collections that will interest not just historians and also genealogists. First person perspective both through intentional writings and in the documents one leaves behind just really enrich our research as we learn more about the people, places and dynamics of a locale where our ancestors may have lived.

New Online: Margaret Bayard Smith Papers

New Online: Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton Papers

As stated in the blog post about Margaret Bayard Smith’s Papers …

For anyone interested in the founding era in Washington, D.C., the writings of Margaret Bayard Smith (1778–1844) and Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (ca. 1775–1865) and are essential sources. Both lived their entire adult lives in the capital city and, as members of the city’s elite, were friends with one another and important political figures of the era. Their proximity to power made them unusual, but their writings also illustrate what it was like to be a woman in the early republic…

Beyond revealing her emotions and private life, the papers are rich with details of the politics of the early national era. Readers can get a further taste of the richness of Smith’s writing in her 1809 accounts of James Madison’s inauguration (original and published transcription) and her visit to Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello (original and published transcription). Those looking for political references will find the most in the correspondence with her sisters, Maria Bayard Boyd and Jane Bayard Kirkpatrick. Discussions of religion and slavery are found throughout the papers. The eight reels of microfilm now online are helpfully broken down by date, correspondent’s name or both in the finding aid.

As stated in the blog post about Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton …

Thornton came from much more humble origins than Smith. She was born around 1775 to Ann Brodeau, who emigrated to Philadelphia from England that year to establish a school. The identity of her father is a mystery. He may have been English clergyman William Dodd, who was hanged for forgery two years later. At only 15, she married 31-year-old William Thornton, an architect from the British West Indian island of Tortola. He helped plan the capital city, designed the United States Capitol and served as head of the Patent Office.

The couple came to Washington in 1792, before the city was built, and, like the Smiths, became fixtures of the Washington elite. While William Thornton is better known, and a volume of his writings has been published—the Manuscript Division also has a large collection of his papers—Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton’s writings are an important source of information about daily life in Washington.

What most surprised you about these women as documented in their papers?

What was your favorite find?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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03 July 2017

Archivegrid – The Manuscript Collection Resource You NEED to Check out!

Archivegrid – The Manuscript Collection Resource You NEED to Check out!

Over the course of the summer, I plan to republish some older blog posts written about some of my favorite resources …

Archivegrid is another “go to” resource for me. So many genealogical gems are hidden in manuscript collections. Historically, that was mainly due to the fact that it was very challenging to figure out who held what manuscript (aka private) collections. Now with Archivegrid and related platforms, we can get insight into manuscript collections – who holds them and increasingly the linked finding aids reveal digitized content!

I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t done a dedicated blog on this website before! And, phew, I realized that I had done a post as a follow up to NGS 2014!

Originally published 26 May 2014 … (links checked and still seem to be working!)

NGS 2014 Family History Conference – Session T260 – Diving into Archives: Uncovering ArchiveFinder and ArchiveGrid

T260 (R) Diving into Archives: Uncovering ArchiveFinder and ArchiveGrid, D. Joshua Taylor, MA, MLS, Syllabus page 283

The talk was great in reminding us how many archives there are in the world and also the enormous task that archives are faced with in terms of identifying what they have and making their materials accessible to the public.

Recently, an archivist had mentioned ArchiveGrid to me. I did play around with it a bit though I didn’t appreciate using the “summary view” vs the “list view” mode as described by Joshua and that is the way I will look at results in the future. A long list of results was tedious to go through and it lacked contextual information; not so when using the summary view mode. Searching on “wake county” ledger brought up 14 results now characterized in a much easier-to-digest mode (see graphic above). Finding aids, if available from the participating institutions, are included in the search.

Joshua also suggested subscribing to the ArchiveGrid blog, which I have just done, to keep current on new collections. The most recent post was about 13 newly registered institutions from Australia and New Zealand. Good news for anyone researching for ancestors “down under.” [Editor’s Note – The blog seems to have been discontinued in late 2014. The site landing page does have a Recent Additions box]

I was unfamiliar with ArchiveFinder (Proquest) and that might be more explained by it being available only to institutional subscribers. ArchiveFinder is a current directory which describes over 220,000 collections housed in repositories in the US, UK and Ireland.

I was also unfamiliar with the Library of Congress Authorities list. Since many libraries, archives and other repositories use this system as the basis for their cataloguing. Having an understanding of what headings/references have been catalogued can help you better search in any catalogs that you come across.

So, two news tools in my genealogical research arsenal.

The associated syllabus pages provide a lot of detail about what you might find in each of these resources and how to best search the contents to identify possibly relevant archival material.

Missed the preceding posts on Linkpendium and Death Online? Just search on “Upfront with NGS” and the above words.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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