Tag Archives: open access resources

Free images to use and reuse and Happy OA Week!

Posted by on October 22, 2020 No comments
Olveritas Village

Olvera Street in the oldest part of downtown Los Angeles, California

Here’s a seasonal and timely message from the Free to Use and Reuse collection at the Library of Congress.

The seasonal part of the message is they are profiling images of autumn, Día de Muertos and Halloween in this subset of their collection.

The timely part is that this is also Open Access Week, a global event for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. This year’s emphasis is on examining who the knowledge-sharing and information spaces and systems are designed for, who is missing, who is excluded by the business models we use, and whose interests are prioritized.

OA 2020 banner logo

 

You can be a Citizen DJ!

Posted by on September 29, 2020 No comments
citizen_dj_logo

citizen_dj_logo

The Library of Congress sponsors many kinds of residency programs. One of them involves different kinds of digital humanities projects.

Citizen DJ is a project by Brian Foo developed during his time as an Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. The application invites the public to make hip hop music using the Library’s public audio and moving image collections. By embedding these materials in hip hop music, listeners can discover items in the Library’s vast collections that they likely would never have known existed. For technical documentation and code, please see the report.

50 New Recordings Added to Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape

Posted by on October 16, 2018 1 comment

The Library of Congress has just added 50 new recordings to their free, open-access collection the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape. According to the Library of Congress, “The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape was begun in 1943 by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress to record audio recordings of poets and prose writers from Spain, Portugal, Latin America, the Caribbean and from the Hispanic Community in the United States reading from their works.” The collection includes audio from authors from Angola, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. One highlight from the newly added recordings is indigenous literature.

[The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape] also includes, for the very first time, recordings of works in indigenous languages, such as the recording of Mexican scholar Ángel María Garibay (1892-1967) who reads Aztec poetry in Nahuatl and Spanish; Mexican writer Andrés Henestrosa (1906-2008) who reads works in Zapotec, a pre-Columbian language from Oaxaca, Mexico; and poet Andrés Alencastre (1909-1984) who reads verses in Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. Another linguistic gem included in this release is a reading by Spanish writer Unai Elorriaga (1973- ) in Basque or “Euskara,” a Pre-Indo-European language spoken in northern Spain.

The recordings include audio recordings from authors like Argentine writer Griselda Gambaro. (Image copyright Diario de Cultura.)

Head on over to the archive to listen to check out this wealth of almost 800 recordings from well-known authors like Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as new favorites like Griselda Gambaro, Beatriz Guido, and Denise Chávez.

Free Digital Archive of Black Newspapers Goes Live

Posted by on June 15, 2018 No comments

As of June 2018, the Obsidian Collection Archives is now available online. This digital collection of historic black newspaper archives was started when executive director Angela Ford realized that physical archives of papers like Chicago Defender were rapidly deteriorating and in need of preservation. ”To make matters worse, when she told her son about newsworthy things that had happened when she was growing up, he often found there was no record of those, either. ‘He’d go to Google it, and it wasn’t there,’ she says. ‘I thought, ‘Wait, what?… My past was disintegrating. That’s how I got involved: to save black history and to save myself.'” (Source)

Eight exhibitions are now live, with many more to be added.

Woman and girls on Maxwell Street, Shakir Karriem, Photographer 1983-08. From the collection of
The Obsidian Collection Archives.

From the Obsidian Collection’s mission statement:

Our primary goal is to preserve and share images from African American newspapers to future generations. As Black people moved about the country, the documentation of their lives was recorded on very few mediums. The African American Newspapers were of the few published tools of the first half of the twentieth century to capture any record of our lives, our goals, our suffering and our strength.

The list of partner newspapers can be accessed here, and you can read more about the project at Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian.com.

New Digital Collections from the Library of Congress

Posted by on May 8, 2018 No comments

The Library of Congress has just added new primary-source materials to its expansive digital collections. Among these materials are the papers of Susan B. Anthony and Benjamin Franklin, and a collection related to the National Film Registry. If film studies are your thing, then you’ll love the latter. You can watch entire films like St. Louis Blues, in which “[l]egendary blues singer Bessie Smith finds her gambler lover Jimmy messin’ with a pretty, younger woman; he leaves and she sings the blues, with chorus and dancers.”

Enjoy exploring these brand-new collections here!

Resources for National Park Week

Posted by on April 24, 2018 No comments

Did you know that it’s National Park Week this week? In celebration, the Scout Report has put together a great list of online resources related to national parks in the United States and beyond. These include Rose Aguilar and Laura Flynn’s article “Your Call: The history of Native Americans and National Parks,” NASA’s National Parks from Space, and the Open Parks Network.

Photo courtesy of Dave Sizer.

You can start exploring all of these amazing resources here. And who knows? Maybe they’ll even lead you to explore a national park or two.