Tag Archives: library of congress

Today in History

Posted on by

Coming up with good Tweets and FB posts for work can be a challenge at times, especially if one has to pay attention not only to the social media etiquette but also to a federal agency’s social media policy.

The National Transportation Library’s collection includes a wonderful book called “The American Book of Days”, by Jane M. Hatch, and I use it quite often to see if any of those dates are related to transportation issues. I also found out that my birthday, April 10, marks the birthday of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. He was born in 1829 in Nottingham, England (Robin Hood anyone?). 

Today, while hunting for good tweeting and posting material, I came across the web site “This Day in History“, and found out that today, back in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite.

While that is somewhat transportation-related I thought it was more appropriate to leave this topic to NASA and check for something more down to earth.

So, this day in Transportation History, President A. Lincoln observed the first balloon demonstration near Washington, DC (1861) and in 1992 a cargo plane crashed into an apartment building near an airport in Amsterdam, Holland. The first occurrence is obviously a happier event; however, the NTL has an online special collection of historial aircraft accident reports, which are quite interesting. You can find them on the Special Collections page, along with some other interesting resources.

And going back to my tweets and posts: Last week my co-worker and I held a presentation about Federal Libraries and Social Media at the Library of Congress. Our Power Point presentation will be online shortly. We’ve gotten great feedback so far, so I hope that you’ll enjoy the presentation.

FLICC/FEDLINK Presentation

Posted on by

My colleague Rosalind Romain (law librarian here at NTL) and I will be presenting at a workshop facilitated by the Institute for Library Technicians, held at the Library of Congress September 29 & 30. Our presentation will focus on library technology and social media.

From the announcement:

This two-day institute, the newest offering in FLICC’s series
for federal library technicians, will begin to prepare new and seasoned technicians for the expanded roles library technicians are filling as the architecture of our libraries is changing.
In line with FLICC’s recently released “Competencies for Librarians”, this training program will feature those skills that federal library technicians need to meet the challenges of the latest trends in federal libraries.

The program will feature:

~ ROI for libraries and library technicians
~ Managing A Library: A Technicians Prospective
~ Disaster Preparedness
~ Budgeting for Federal Libraries
~ Library Technology Management and Social Media
~ Library Para-Professionalism
~ HR Competencies Assessment
~ Competencies for a Competitive Advantage

Speakers will be representing a variety of federal agencies including
the Departments of the Interior, Justice and Transportation, Law Library of Congress, Army Counterintelligence Center and the Library of Congress.

Internship at LoC : A Final Perspective

Posted on by

This summer I interned with the Library of Congress, more specifically with the Business Reference Section, located in the Adams building right on Capitol Hill. It was an amazing experience.In this article I would like to share some of the things that stood out the most.
The (incredibly knowledgeable) business librarians receive a variety of questions every day, in person, via phone or QuestionPoint. I did not realize that many of the QP questions come from other countries. Answering those is tricky at times, especially when the patron is not a native speaker. In a case like this, the business librarians usually do not try to simply answer the question. They provide sources that leads the patron “into the neighborhood of what they want to know”. As we all know, reference interviews often reveal that the initial question does not describe the actual information need. I learned a lot from this hands-on experience, and it illustrated that librarians do not necessarily know everything … they just know where to find it. Having a broad general knowledge is probably the most important thing we can strive for.
Many patrons are interested in the history of a business. LoC is a great place for doing that kind of research, given the incredible amount of old documents and publications that are stored not only on-site but also off-site at Ft. Meade. The latter  has been designed to preserve fragile materials, using cold storage and even freezers to fight deterioration. I was not able to visit Ft. Meade; however, I spend a considerable amount of time in the LoC stacks, marvelling at collectionsHistoric yellow pages for example. Did you know that back in the day yellow pages would not only list the phone number and address for a company but also the name of the president, vice-president, secretary and other important figures, including their home phone numbers and addresses? What a great resource for people conducting historic research!
Only a fraction of the collection is accessible to the public. Most items have to be retrieved from the stacks. And you have to think BIG here … the stacks are located on 12 floors, many of the underground. If you do not know where an item is located, you will probably never find it. Did you know that the floors at LoC are not only divided into North and South, but are also reversed? Like on a submarine, the first floor is all the way on top, and the twelfth floor is on the bottom.
Aside from working at the reference desk and answering questions on QP I also revised a business guide for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners, which will be online at www.loc.gov in the near future. I hope I will be able to share it with you in the next newsletter, and that you will find it useful in one way or another.