Library of Congress Receives $1 Million Mellon Grant to Experiment with Digital Collections as Big Data (Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud Project)

From LC:

The Library of Congress announced today that it has been awarded a $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) project, which will pilot ways to combine cutting edge technology and the collections of the largest library in the world, to support digital research at scale.

“As technology advances, we envision a future in which all users — researchers, artists, students and more – are only limited by the questions they can think to ask; where scale, complexity, uniqueness, and speed are aligned to support their goals and result in fundamentally transformed ways of understanding the world around us,” said Kate Zwaard, the Library’s Director of Digital Strategy. “We’re excited that The Mellon Foundation has agreed to help us explore how to make our vision a reality.”

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With the grant support, the LC Labs team will test a cloud-based approach for interacting with digital collections as data.  In collaboration with subject matter experts and IT specialists at the Library, LC Labs will invite a cohort of research experts to experiment with solutions to problems that can only be explored at scale.  This effort will help produce models for supporting cloud-based research computing, and will make the costs and possibilities of this work more transparent to the broader cultural heritage community.

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The CCHC project will enable the Library to realize its new vision “to connect all Americans to the Library of Congress” by providing a mechanism to build a user-centered access model for computation.

This is the second major Mellon Foundation Grant awarded to the Library this year. In February 2019 the Library received a $540,000 grant for the Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD) to evaluate the physical health of the national collection of books in American research libraries and to guide their archive retention and preservation decisions.

Direct to Complete Announcement

Direct to LC Labs Website

Video From December 2016′ “Cultural Heritage & Data” Symposium at LC

Symposium Agenda

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