ResearchBuzz

Oh, such coolness — the Library of Congress recently announced that it’s teaming up with Flickr. According to the LOC blog post, “If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata…”

(Flickr is actually working on a project to get the world generating metadata for publicly-held photograph collections — see The Commons at http://www.flickr.com/commons .)

The idea is that the Library of Congress now has its own Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ . Photos are being posted there for users to tag, comment about, and provide more information on. Though there are literally millions of photos/prints/visual things in the LOC’s collections, the LOC page has launched with over 3,000 items.

The photographs cover a lot of ground but the LOC does have two sets of photos available — 1930s-1940s in Color and News in the 1910s. Just browsing through all the photographs finds all kinds of topics, from smokestacks to medals to cowboys to baseball players.

I was amazed at how many people have commented on these photographs. And get a load of the tag clouds. “Vintage”, as you might imagine, is a very popular tag.

If you want to search Flickr for just LOC content, you can use the search form at http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=&w=8623220%40N02 . I tried to use Yahoo Images to search the images by other parameters (like size,whether the image is in color or not, etc.) but I couldn’t figure out how to limit Yahoo Images results to a particular Flickr user.

Okay, so it’s not “Hix Nix Stix Pix”. I tried. Anyway, there’s a new digital archive available for Jay Norwood (”Ding”) Darling and his editorial cartoons — over 10,000 of them, and some audio recordings as well. They’re available at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ding/.

Ding Darling was not only an editorial cartoonist for almost 50 years, but was also once head of what is now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, so what’s here is all over the map. (By the way, if you have a minute, read this site’s history. How the archivists dealt with the audio is great reading.)

The audio is off in its own section. You can listen to four clips of Darling’s dictation of correspondence.

Now the cartoons are both searchable and browsable. You can search by keyword, or you can browse by subject — topic, people, events, and depictions. You can also browse ALL the cartoons, but since there are over 10,000 of ‘em, I’d skip that. I did a search for prohibition and got 422 results. Search results include a thumbnail, title of the cartoon, original date of issue (often a full date but sometimes only a month and year) and topic.

Click on the cartoon and you’ll get a much larger cartoon (but sometimes not large enough; Darling’s drawings are very detailed) with additional information including people mentioned (hyperlinked to lists of other cartoons), rights information, and the complete text of the cartoons, which is useful when you have cartoons like “Interviews that Never Happened”. The cartoons are not, unfortunately, large enough that the text is easy to read.

Some of these cartoons are very local, which left me completely lost, while some of them are interesting cultural lessons (search for fashion.) A fun browse.

Google is offering a new API to dynamically generate charts in PNG files, and it’s easy to use. So you may come back here in a week and find I’ve randomly generated charts and stuck them in everywhere. The documentation for the chart tool is available at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ .

You generate the chart by adding things to a URL. You start here:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?

To this you add your parameters, separating them with ampersands. They’re at the URL in the first paragraph, but for a basic chart you only need a few:

cht= — Chart type. You can specify one of several chart types including line, bar, scatter, and pie.

chd= — Chart data. There are three different ways to encode the chart data, depending on what you’re trying to do. This is probably the most complicated part of the chart.

chs= — Chart size, specified by width in pixels by height in pixels. The maximum size of a chart is 300,000 pixels.

If I wanted to generate a 200×200 (pixel) line chart with two sets of data, the URL would look like this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=200×200&chd=t:3,8,33,1|70,6,4,2

and the image itself would look like this:

Of course, there’s not much information in this chart. You can add a lot of additional items to the URL like chart title, legend, and axis labels (depending on what kind of chart you’re creating, of course.) You can also add colors to the chart, format the text, and so on. (There are a lot of options here. There are so many options I’m kind of jealous when I consider creating charts in Google Spreadsheet.)

Aside from size, the only limit to the chart generator is the number of times you can use it per day — and at the moment that limit is 50,000. (Since no key is required to use the chart, I’m guessing that Google is going by IP address. There’s a very brief FAQ for the service at http://code.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=13605 .