www.loc.gov
Eleven SI students spent their ASB week at the Library of Congress -- the nation’s oldest federal institution.
The students were assigned to different departments within the Library where they worked on a variety of projects during the week. The projects included cataloguing, metadata retroconversion, updating online resources, database management and usability, providing workflow recommendations, and doing background research for various collections.
Amy Anderson
worked for the Foreign Area Analytical Research Department. She annotated a list of electronic resources used in creating Country Profiles, and she interviewed staff to determine the best scheme for organizing the materials.
Irene Cheung was a consultant for the Fee-Based Marketing Unit. She assessed the marketing database and general communications in terms of usability, clarity of message and ways to improve. This included making software recommendations to upgrade their legacy database and examining the brand identity of the unit.
Shevon Desai worked on the Library's "Portals to the World" web pages,
which involved learning the system and adding about 40 links to the
existing resources. She also had the opportunity to view the Library's new standards/requirements for the pages and begin finding, reviewing, and adding links in that capacity.
Kristina Eden spent the week with the Local History and Genealogy Department where she updated a handout for printing from the census databases and
another that listed database holdings. She also did personal research using the city directory microfilms and family history collection.
Autumn Kladder was in the Cartography Department where she spent her week cataloging various cartographic materials, attending
Library of Congress meetings, and generating/revising maps.
J.J. Jacobson worked with the Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team on the "Web Access to Publicatoins in Series" project. This involved providing links from the Library of Congress catalog to the digital versions of monographic series in the fields of business and economics. She found a collection of working papers in economics from American universities, and reviewed them to see if they were suitable for inclusion. She also worked with “Web Cataloging Assistant,” a computer application that extracts bibliographic data from the websites of monographic series and automatically creates MARC records for individual monographs.
Erin Matas researched and identified the subjects in several lots of stereoviews from the Marion S. Carson Collection, which is part of the Stereograph Collection. She also created group MARC catalog records for the lots and processed the identified views for placement into the stereograph collection.
Devon Persing did a retroconversion of records (putting information from card catalogs into the P&P OPAC), produced group-level description of collections of photographs from many different sources, assigned subject headings to part of a frequently used collection, and did some independent research to provide a better record of some collections. She also attended meetings with the department’s reference librarians, department heads, curators, conservators, and digitalization specialists.
Andrew Peterson assisted in updating the Library of Congress website interface by dividing up images of online maps and making hot spots on them so users could be directed to particular countries on the "Country Studies" page. He also attended meetings and tours where he learned a great deal about the behind-the-scenes work at the Library.
Kate Zoellner’s goal for the week was to document, analyze, and make suggestions for the improvement of the workflow of serials routed to her section. Her supervisor provided historical data and gave her a box of sample serials to understand what was being routed and how routed items were marked. After her assessment, she developed a questionnaire to get other staff members' views of the current situation. She produced a lot of documentation resulting in a final report, and she gave an informal presentation to the staff members on the last day explaining her work and suggestions for them to consider. The project very much resembled an SI 501 assignment! Kate also had the opportunity to sit in on an instruction section given by one of the Area Specialists to a graduate course from Howard University.
