“A Secure Environment to Explore”: Learn About the AI Sandbox Initiative For Staff at the Library of Congress
From an LC Blog Post:
In 2025, the Library introduced its AI Sandbox for staff initiative to do just that. “Sandbox” environments have been used since the early 1970s to provide protected spaces for development and experimentation without risk to systems.
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While AI technologies have growing potential to augment and enrich the Library’s collections and services, experimentation and security are key. To better understand how these creative and innovative methods might work with various materials and conditions, the most recent cohort of the Library’s AI Sandbox for staff supported over a dozen small-scale experiments. Teams incorporated technical and subject matter expertise to focus their experimentation on the real-life demands and possibilities for Library workflows.
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Projects focused on materials spanning the Library’s rich collections: legal records and briefs; circulars and regulations; images; talking books; audiovisual materials, classified ads from historic newspapers; web archived government PDFs; manuscript materials in Arabic, Persian, Ge’ez, Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, Japanese, Chinese, and Hebrew; children’s and young adult books, sound recordings; web archived metadata; record annotations; oral history recordings; non-Latin monographs; catalog records; training materials and resources; and even more items accessible via the Library of Congress collections API.
About Gary Price
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.
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