Library of Congress Blogs

An amazing women with some... strange?... romantic preferences: "In 1895, Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman. Bly was 31 and Seaman was 73 when they married. Due to her husband's failing health, she left journalism and succeeded her husband as head of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers. Seaman died in 1904." You can see more about her asylum expose here: https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2022/11/nellie-bly-blackwells… EDIT: Even better, the full book: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html

God I love maps, real or otherwise. In fact, I recently re bought The Lord of the Rings for the cartography! My favorite by a country mile, though, is the Japanese scroll map detailing (and I do mean detailing) the road to Kyoto: https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2022/07/the-road-to-kyoto/

It's a way to show that the legal system is too complex. In the 80s the Justice Department tried to count the total number of criminal laws and they failed.[0] If the government can't even keep track of the number of them, then how is it reasonable to expect regular people to follow all of them? [0] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-question-how-many…

I learned recently that the LoC has a whole bunch fascinating blogs: https://blogs.loc.gov/ I find the "Preservation" one most interesting personally, but they've got a huge variety of topics.

I found the stories of the solved pictures in 2018 to be a great read: https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2018/05/hard-won-victories-solving-…

I agree, but somehow a LoC became a well-established unit of measuring data transfer[1]. So maybe less-technical readers are used to hearing that comparison. 1 - https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of…

The article title is misleading, they haven't "quit twitter", they're just no longer archiving every public tweet (except for a select few, e.g. those that are likely to be historically interesting/noteworthy - e.g. Trump's twitter utterances). Perhaps the title should be editorialised to something like: "Library of Congress announce a change in collections practice for Twitter" edit: @dang - how about changing the link to: https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the… or https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/files/2017/12/2017dec_twitter_white-paper.pd…

Ancient Greece and Rome both had a small elite exploiting the masses, and both states practiced slavery. The Bible endorses the institution of slavery as God's natural order numerous times in both the Old and New Testament. Europe held the greatest slaveowning imperialist powers the world has ever known - and monarchies to boot. Also there is no such thing as "European culture" or "Western culture"[0] per se, that's a modern retrofiction meant to lend credence to white nationalist ideology, much less any credibility in the claim that such is the sole originator and inheritor of the concept of democratic government. India had its own democratic ideals[0], as did Africa[2], and America's own democracy is derived in part from that of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy[3]. Also... since you're implying (as everyone who makes this argument does) that Islam is "simply not compatible with democracy," the cultures of the Islamic world have been influenced by ancient Greek and Christian philosophy since Islam began[4,5]. That's why European culture(s) had to recover much of the knowledge they lost after the Dark Ages from Muslim sources. So your statement disproves itself even by its own ethnocentric…

It's good that they have agreed to rename this popular peak to recognize the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who lived in that region. As usual, a little history lesson may help people understand what happened and why it was so contemptible to name this peak for someone who instigated such a heinous massacre of peaceful people. First I will post a first-hand account of the massacre from a letter written by a courageous officer who held his men back and did not participate in the slaughter, Captain Silas Soule [0]. As noted in the post above, Capt. Soule was murdered a few months after giving testimony against Col Chivington and others involved in the massacre. His murderer(s) though known, were never punished. One name you see mentioned in his letter is George Bent. George was the mixed race (Cheyenne mother/Anglo father) son of William Bent who along with his brother Charles and a French-Canadian trapper Ceran St. Vrain established Bent's Fort on the Santa Fe trail. [1] These men established a trading empire where anyone could procure supplies to outfit their expeditions whether they were Anglo, Mexican, or Native American. It was a frontier hub and the Bents were well-known all over the region. A little of George Bent's life is related in this link [2]. You can visit Bent's Fort today if you are in the area and it is worth the effort. Black Kettle, [3] the Southern Cheyenne chief who thought that he had negotiated a plan for his people to live in peace, escaped this…

>All I'm doing here is turning the knobs and testing the variables here. I realize it might be crude, I apologize for that. You're probably a lawyer, and you probably hate this. I understand what you are doing. Lawyers have been doing it for over 100 years litigating copyright, and it's reflected in the caselaw, which has much deeper answers for the questions you are poking at. >The line I'm trying to understand is this: Mockey has three buttons and was generated by an AI, and looks similar to Mickey. I can copy that art and become the human owner of it (my hands are the 'spark of creativity' mentioned in our Wikipedia article), then sell it. Disney will claim that selling this art can infringe on its copyright, but nobody earns copyright to the AI-generated art itself. I own copyright to my physical, hand drawn copy of it. Okay; The question you are asking is what's a copy. That's a really complicated answer, that is dependent upon numerous factors, which as I mentioned before, is best answered through the caselaw on the subject. There is no clear line. There never was a clear line. By the way, you didn't respond to my hypothetical! >Taking that apart: Disney's copyright is infringed when? The sale? The second I drew Mockey? Or the second the AI created it? Or is it when the AI was trained? Take a copyright class somewhere! I'm sure there's some free ones online. I work with the VLA and we provide such classes to member artists. There are numerous rights associated…

> EDIT: I just searched the Library of Congress for “god” and was told I was viewing results 1-25 of 324,782. Sure enough when I asked for page 10,000 I was rebuffed. I really don’t think this is a Google thing This is a common problem called deep pagination, and it basically stems down to how most search systems work. When you make that search request on loc.gov, it eventually turns into a complex request for Apache Solr. Answering that request requires Solr to find all of the matching documents which match the query and any other active filters (e.g. document type, date, etc.), and calculate their rank in the search result set so it can determine which specific results are numbers 10,000-10,050. Solr/Lucene are really mature and well-tuned but when you think about how many millions of documents there are in that index, this is still calculating a pretty large temporary set only to serve 50 records, throw away the other 324k, and go on to the next query. Your next request might arrive a second later but get routed to a different replica so it’s a cold cache there, too. Click one facet on the filter list, and the search engine has to recalculate the matching documents again. Don’t forget that you’re often seeing the results of more than just the metadata. You often get the best search results by treating entire books, newspapers, etc. as a single group for the purposes of ranking and then displaying it as a single entry on the top-level search. I wrote about this a while…

> Like, all the knowledge ever. Go to your local library. There is actually a lot more there than books. There are videos and audio records too. There are news paper clippings too. Worse, data is being generated very fast. Let's look[0] > [In 2012], CenturyLink projects that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created. By 2015, the projection is 7.9 zettabytes. > MAST is currently home to an estimated *200 terabytes of data*, which… is nearly the same amount of information contained in *the U.S. Library of Congress.* But that said, a few petabytes is going to only cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars and max in the low 100s. So this is well within the budget of even every modestly sized city and definitely every university. It would be even easier if this was done with torrenting. I think the real question is^: why are we not, as a species, creating this system? It seems very reasonable that we could back up all data. (There is also a dark side to this too! So let's not forget about that) At least, why aren't we creating a full access world library for all scholarly data, which is probably something that could be housed for a few grand. Should we do this on our own given the relatively low cost? Books + sci-hub + arxiv + *xiv? [0] https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of… ^ maybe it is already being done and I don't know, please inform me if it is. (Other than the NSA)

But besides the money collection there are also the tax exemptions right? It looks lovely... "The foundation deed specified that the housing complex was to exist “in perpetuity” and to be “further developed.” The philosophy behind it can be summarized as being to “provide assistance, not charity, to people in need so they can help themselves.” There are a total of nine foundations established by the Fugger family in Augsburg that have been in continuous existence since the 16th century. In addition to the Fuggerei, there are medical facilities, an infirmary, and a foundation to contribute to the salvation of the Fugger family, among others. According to an inscription on a tablet displayed at the Fuggerei, the Fugger family established the foundation to “reimburse God the money that he has generously bestowed upon the family.” "Paupers or beggars are not eligible. A person that has been accepted for residence is required to say three daily prayers for the Fugger family" https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/08/500-year-anniversary-of-the-fuggerei… Its going for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugger_family And many foundations: https://www.fugger.de/en/foundations I am sorry ...the business man in me...every time I see the word foundation I see only one thing. Only business vehicle where you are tax exempt... while at the same time still benefiting from the foundation assets. "Forget about the Gates Foundation. The…

I meant Library of Congress, an anachronistic visual metaphor related to data storage from the 1990s, perhaps earlier? In 2012, 1 LoC was roughly equivalent to ~3 PB (petabytes). I remember first seeing it on Slashdot way back in the day, before they had user moderation or user meta-moderation. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of… If you save the source document, the code needed to parse your recipe archive is likely to be pretty short. Then you have a corpus to do A/B testing of your recipe parsing code against. Side note: I feel that moderation and later meta-moderation system on Slashdot was the most transparent, fun, positive moderation system I’ve ever been part of. I wish HN had more than just up and downvotes, for instance. User meta-moderation would help reduce flamewars immensely IMO. https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml

I would agree with you if our legal systems were built for that, but our legal systems are built to deal with a society that has privacy. People unknowingly commit crimes, or implicate themselves in crimes, all the time, because there are too many ways to do that. No reasonable person can be expected to avoid committing crimes when the government itself can't even keep track of the number of criminal laws there are.[0] You're supposed to follow rules that the government itself can't even keep count of. This works reasonably well as long as the government doesn't have evidence about everything you've done, but the moment that they can track a large chunk of your life is when this system stops working. With data from Google they can prosecute you for all the things you've done wrong or seem to have done wrong. It just takes an ambitious prosecutor to do it. This pretty much destroys the point of the fifth amendment. The "Don't Talk to the Police" lecture [1] is still relevant today, but if the state has this much evidence of what you do, then I'm not sure that will protect people. It is a nightmare scenario if this sets a precedent on law enforcement being able to vacuum up all of your data about your life. I agree that Smollett seemingly getting a slap on the wrist was outrageous, but I think that this is Pandora's Box that they're playing with. [0] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-question-how-many… [1]…

What is the point of a library if "plebeians" cannot access its contents? 1.5 years ago, in 2014, they received a copy of an unreleased PSP game, titled Duke Nukem Critical Mass: https://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/08/dukes-legacy-video-g… Reading the blog post, it seems they are not competent enough to actually run it, and the best they could do was to open the main executable (BOOT.BIN, the decrypted version) in a hex editor. Some commenters even tried to help them run it, of course without any reply. 1.5 years later, the files are still not available to download, and that disk is basically rotting away somewhere in the "library". Please, if you are a game developer, and care about game preservation, don't submit your games to that library. Instead, upload them anonymously to a torrent tracker of your choice. The internet will do the rest. copyright laws suck.

The Library of Congress runs Webrecorder's Python Wayback for their web archive replay and has an extensive collection of over 35,000 web archives each comprising multiple pages: https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2025/01/beta-release-of-library-of-con…

There is a long history of what goes on a map being controversial. Changing a map or leaving it alone is a position either way. One such area is the disputed region of Kashmir, which has been an issue for decade, as recently as February 2026 [1]. Go back further and you have official maps depicting "savagery" [2]. Even the use of the Mercator projection perpetuates biases. Modern maps aren't as removed from these biases as one might think [3]. [1]: https://www.dawn.com/news/1972510 [2]: https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2021/04/when-savages-roamed-the-earth-maps-… [3]: https://onartandaesthetics.com/2016/12/18/the-politics-of-world-maps/

It's a Wonderful Life the movie is in the public domain: https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2017/12/its-a-wonderful-life/ the book which it was based on isn't nor its soundtrack as you mention. IANAL but could someone produce a public domain version of this movie with a public domain soundtrack?

President Calvin Coolidge had a pet raccoon in the White House: https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2021/01/when-rebecca-the-raccoon-ruled-the-w…

What’s good for Tesla is good for America. Charles E. Wilson. https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2016/04/when-a-quote-is-not-exactly…

Thank you! I scanned the text and scrolled through all the pics, and searched for `tenoch` and didn't get any hits. "The urban sprawl caused the lake system to dry up" glosses over a super interesting sequence of decisions that led to the disaster. More reading for anyone interested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mexico_City#Flooding,_the_Des… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Texcoco#Artificial_drainage https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2022/09/mexico-citys-desage-of-1607-from-an-…

Related: some fascinating history about the origin of the dreidel. Stephen Winick. (2022, December 13). The Truth Behind the Hanukkah Dreidel: Metafolklore, Play, and Spin | Folklife Today. The Library of Congress. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2022/12/the-truth-behind-the-hanukkah-d…

The Library of Congress does currently archive limited collections of the internet[0]. They have a blog post[1] breaking down the effort, currently it's 8 full time staff with a team of part time members. According to Wikipedia[2], it's built on Heritrix and Wayback which are both developed by the Internet Archive (blog post also mentions "Wayback software"). Current archives are available at: http://webarchive.loc.gov/ [0] https://www.loc.gov/programs/web-archiving/about-this-program/ [1] https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2023/08/the-web-archiving-team-answers… [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiatives

I knew Clydeside had built a lot of ships, but I hadn't realised quite how many until I found this: "In the 1890s, British shipyards built seventy-five percent of ships worldwide, two-thirds of which came from Clydeside" https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2017/09/clydeside-shipbuilding-and-…

>How do you explain nail houses in China then? A private entity trying to buy a private entity is not the same as the Chinese government taking or using the land they, the state, owns: "According to the Constitution, land in cities is owned by the State; land in the rural and suburban areas is owned by the State or by collectives. (Constitution, art. 10.) Although individuals cannot privately own land, they may obtain transferable land-use rights for a number of years for a fee."[0] Any chance your bold assertion is something you just pulled out of the air? [0] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2015/03/chinese-law-on-private-ownership-of-…

> That they were legally required to accept Again, source? Because to my knowledge, this wasn’t true. The requirements for public tender were lifted, which just meant contracts could be sole sourced. Those contracts were negotiated and paid for [1]. There was an element of coercion, sure. But I can find no evidence of anyone coming away from their business with the U.S. poorer. [1] https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2013/03/wwii-detail-from-war-supply…

Yes. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/09/yes-the-library-of-congress-ha…

The Library of Congress has an archive of every tweet from 2006 to 2017. In 2018, they began selectively archiving tweets. I can't find how selective they are exactly, but as far as I can tell, the project is still ongoing. 1. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the…

Prison work as extensively done here is unconstitutional. Period. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/alabama-prisons-slavery-la… https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2021/06/convict-leasing-system/