The Library of Congress is digging into baseball data

The Library of Congress has a new exhibit focusing on baseball. Titled “Baseball Americana,” the D.C. institution is offering a chance to look at the people behind the game, and how it spread around the globe.

Along with the exhibit, the Library of Congress Labs is also digging into baseball data. Given the stat-loving nature of many baseball fans, perhaps that’s not surprising.

This week, LOC brought together a group to build tools that can help explore baseball data collections. As part of “Inside Baseball,” two teams, LC Labs and JSTOR Labs, are working on a “flash build” to prototype tools using baseball-related metadata and object data from the Library of Congress and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Organizers are planning to make the data available at the end of the week, and host an open hackathon using the data this fall.

“LC Labs is routinely trying out new ways to connect the public with our digital collections,” Abigail Potter, senior innovation specialist in the National Digital Initiatives program at the Library of Congress, said via email. “We are combining innovative approaches to build tools with the rich resources of our institutions to spark discovery and more conversation with our users.”

Follow along with #BaseballLabs this week for a sneak peek into our flash build process, as we train for the Inside Baseball Showcase this Friday! Register now at https://t.co/xPGFyiUgk8 pic.twitter.com/QOW9bi49WN

— LC Labs (@LC_Labs) July 9, 2018

To close out this series, the Library of Congress is holding an event on Friday, July 13, to showcase what’s being built. The 10 a.m.–3 p.m. event will have presentations from the teams working this week. It also includes a panel featuring Clinton Yates, a columnist at sports site The Undefeated; Rob Ruck, a historian who authored the 2011 book Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game; and Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin.