In 2018, the Library launched the very popular Free To Use and Reuse Sets, where staff curate thematic sets of items from our digital collections that are either in the public domain, have no known copyright restrictions or have been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. The public is not only free to enjoy and consume this material, but they are also encouraged to transform them, recontextualize them, and make them their own. One of the first examples of “reuse” that we nearly all encounter at a young age is collage—the art of selecting, cutting, pasting, and rearranging found material and imagery.
In the summer of 2024, Junior Fellows Ilayda Dogan, Shauna-Kay Harrison and Aisaiah Pellecer worked with LC Labsto explore how they can create a new and engaging digital collage tool by leveraging emerging technologies and approaches in areas such as machine learning and computer vision. Starting with the Library’s Free to Use and Reuse items, the Junior Fellows used the latest approaches for computational techniques such as object detection and image segmentation to automatically identify subjects within a wide variety of images and “cut” them into segments that could be easily arranged and manipulated on an online digital canvas.
A screenshot of the final web interface where users can drag, drop, and manipulate figures and objects within images form the Library’s digital collections.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
