The Library of Congress has launched a new website built to foster the creative use of the Library’s digital collections on experiments, projects, events and other resources.The institution said Tuesday the labs.loc.gov space will have a gallery on projects, blog posts and video presentations from data challenge winners and innovators-in residence in a move to encourage potential discoveries.
LOC noted that the labs website provides visitors with an opportunity to participate in experimental applications and crowdsourcing programs as well as tutorials that aim to promote computational discovery.
“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,” said Kate Zwaard, chief of the Library of Congress’ National Digital Initiatives office.
Labs currently features a crowdsourcing program called Beyond Words which works to find partners that can identify cartoons from historic newspapers and convert the images into searchable data.
The Library noted that it also utilized various industry standards to develop application programming interfaces that can boost the accessibility of various digital collections.
