Fall Fashion from .gov: A New Look for the Library of Congress and a New View of Government Open Source Projects

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/artcomments/382733093

Cold weather inevitably means trading out summer garb with new looks and new fashions for autumn and winter, and this year .gov is getting in on the action with a huge homepage redesign for loc.gov as well as the launch of a new repository site for federal agencies open source projects that gives us a peek behind the curtain at their custom codes.  So let’s celebrate our own mini .gov fashion week with a closer look at both of these projects as they strut down the catwalk…

Library of Congress Homepage Redesign

The web team at the Library of Congress has been hard at work transitioning their online collections into a new, more consistent format that’s both mobile friendly and allows for faceted searching. To help promote and encourage access to all of this content, they’ve created an entirely new homepage for loc.gov that is more dynamic and offers more ways to highlight their extensive collections, services and programs. 

Highlights include:

• A top carousel that displays topical content and will be updated monthly
• A trending section that includes top searches, recently published blog posts and featured items
• A section about “Your Library” that gives you information for planning a visit, provides access to online reference services, and lists current exhibitions and upcoming events
• A free to use and reuse section towards the bottom of the page that features items from the digital collection that are freely available for you to use in your own projects

To learn more about the homepage, check out their recent blog post or go directly to the new homepage.

Code.gov

The White House Office of Management and Budget recently launched code.gov to serve as a repository for federal agencies’ open source projects and to serve as a one-stop shop for exploration, improvement and innovation on the existing code for a variety of government platforms. The code and resources on this site can also be used by other government agencies to assist in implementing new policies, designing metadata schemas to build code inventories, and creating successful open source projects.

The code of this site is a part of the new federal source code policy, which requires agencies to release at least twenty percent of their custom code as open source. Currently, there’s almost fifty different projects available, organized by agency, and more will be added in the coming months.

To learn more about this project, check out fedscoop.com’s recent post or go directly to the site itself.