Tutorials for working with Library of Congress collections data

This site contains in-depth tutorials for working with Library collections data via APIs and code. If you have ideas for additional tutorials, please email LC-Labs@loc.gov.

Introduction

The Library of Congress data-exploration GitHub includes several Jupyter notebooks and example scripts using openly available Library of Congress digital collections or records. Nearly all of these notebooks use the APIs available through https://www.loc.gov. For more information on how to use the loc.gov APIs, see https://www.loc.gov/apis/ .

This accompanying site contains more information about how to use the Jupyter notebooks available in this repository and are loosely categorized by topic: General Query, Images, Geographic Data, Historic Newspapers, and other scripts. Contact LC-labs@loc.gov for questions about these notebooks, or to suggest a new addition.

Tip: The API is a work in progress and things may change at any time. Fields may be added, deleted, or used in different ways, so make any code you write flexible and able to adjust to changes. Not every item is available via the API yet; some collections are still in process of being made available.