June 17

Yuck. I woke up at 5:15am this morning. Way too early. The plan was to get up early, get to work really early and then leave extra early. I already had worked an hour of "credit hour" time this week so I could leave an hour earlier. Things went okay… got to work at 7am and left at 2:30pm. Work was fine. Fast. At lunchtime, which was at like 11am, I took the opportunity to go outside for a walk. It's been a lot cooler, a lot more bearable, the last couple of days, although it was a little windy. I walked around the Capitol and the Botanic Gardens buildings and all the way to the reflecting pool. It was very nice and I took some nice shots of the Capitol. We'll see if they turn out if I ever get my film developed.

Leaving work early was fantastic, although by the time I got to my car and hit the road, it was already about 4pm and I got stuck in MAJOR traffic. Okay, yes, I'm a doofus and my brilliant plan to cut some time out of my trip by driving to a Metro station actually resulted in me losing about 40 minutes as I looked EVERYWHERE for my car and could not find it. Oops. Seems there is a North parking lot and a South parking lot by this particular Metro station and stupid me didn't realize this and wandered around the area (the wrong area) trying to figure out where the heck my car was. But, traffic was already bad by then and I don't think it would have mattered. It ended up taking me 90 minutes just to get out of Virginia - for any of you who understand the landscape of DC, you may realize just how close to being out of Virginia I am staying in Alexandria. Overall, though, once traffic started moving and I used my newly acquired AAA maps to make up my own route back to Syracuse, I was home by 11:30pm, so I think I made some pretty good time. Oh yeah, but I didn't go straight home - I went to the bar where my friends were all wasted out of their minds. Nice. And I didn't get home until almost 5am, which, yes, means I was up for almost 24 hours. But that's okay!! I'm not going to turn down an invitation to hang out at the bar after closing, even if it was only because the bartender wanted to get into my friend's pants. :)

June 16

Today was back to the old routine that we will basically be following all summer - mornings upstairs in cataloging and afternoons downstairs in reference. The cataloging is kind of boring and definitely monotonous, but at least we have specific expectations. We even have to track production, although I’m not sure what is expected of us. My trainer told me earlier in the week something about having to do like 4 an hour, which seems utterly ridiculous. I mean, you can do four in like fifteen minutes if you are actually dedicated to it so to take 15 minutes to do one seems CRAZY. Although, we were given some statistical reports about the number of items processed and cataloged in a given month and it’s remarkably low. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of careful consideration of each item, of slackerness, of me not realizing exactly how difficult the job can be, or if it’s something else entirely. Coming from a job where we were expected to read entire journal articles, write abstracts and add indexes in the time span of about 3 minutes makes me a little skeptical about it being anything other than slacking off. I mean, the rate of speed expected of us at Gale was ridiculous but this seems ridiculous on the other end.

Anyway, the best part of the cataloging is that we get to physically handle the CDs and I like looking at them and listening to them. We've been doing a lot of bands from the 80s and early 90s and a lot of the albums I remember actually being released. Heck, I’ve even owned a few titles – or knew someone who did – so it’s like a walk down memory lane listening to some of the stuff. Today I listened to some umm, Debbie Gibson (yeah, I admit it!) and Foreigner ("I Don’t Want to Live Without Your Love"), to name a couple. We are going through musicians on the Atlantic label.

The sad news of the day was that I found out that apparently the much ballyhooed checkout privileges are really not all that - in fact, we interns are apparently not really allowed to check out books after all. So says the person at CALM (Collections, Acquisitions and Loan Management, I think is what that stands for - hard to keep all the acronyms straight). Intern management personnel claim that we can but they can say that all they want - if the person issuing loan accounts won't give me one, then obviously I can't check out books. Someone told me they would work on it for me but I am pretty doubtful they will. I'm really bummed about that - not so much because I was planning on checking out one-of-a-kind rare books or anything but more just because I'm already finished with the two lousy books I brought to read and was counting on a library card from the LOC to provide me with reading material. Now what am I going to do?

June 15

Another full day of cataloging. That might be a misnomer - I think what we are really doing would be technical services. Cataloging probably involves actually making MARC records or creating call numbers or something. We are simply processing CDs. I've finally started to get the hang of it, too, and am able to do them fairly quickly. Yay!

My next big project (for my own personal development) is figuring out how to check out books, like they told us we were able to do. No one I work with seems to know how to do it - do these people not read? How ironic is it to work at the world's largest library and to not be a reader?

During lunch, I took a little trip to the DC AAA office to get some maps. Stupidly, when I headed down to DC last weekend, although I had printed out the Internet TripTik and therefore had a route, I didn't have any maps, which are essential for me in case I should get stuck in traffic and want to find an alternative route. So, I took the Metro and got maps of Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York - as well as an awesome DC street map - to help me out. I'm so psyched. However, one thing I learned was that during lunchtime, the Metro runs fairly infrequently. I had to wait about 10 minutes for a train to take me back to the Library. Good to know but it sucked trying to get that all done during my hour lunch break.

I also found out that as interns we are indeed allowed to earn credit hours. As a result, I worked an extra half hour today so that I can leave early on Friday. I'm heading back to Syracuse (thus, the need for the maps…) this weekend to get some things that will make my living arrangements more comfortable (like towels - a long story…) not to mention more appropriate attire. I brought too many nice, dress-up clothes when I really should have brought all my jeans and T-shirts. And sweaters. It's really freezing at the Library (particularly in the basement where the CDs are stored) and the CDs we are processing are really dusty. Anyhoo, we can have up to 8 hours of earned credit hours (aka overtime) that we carry over from one pay period to the next. In other words, you can work an hour extra for eight measly days and then take a whole day off. Don't think I'm not already planning my next use of credit hours…

June 14

Yes, today is Flag Day and was therefore the day of the big party. Hoo-rah!! Actually, as much as I mocked it, any time you can get free food at work - not to mention about 90 minutes of lunchtime - I really shouldn't complain. There was a pretty complete menu with like fried chicken, deli meats, potato salad, regular salad, lentil soup, potato chips, tortilla chips, veggies, brownies, cookies and an awesomely rich chocolate cake. Oh yeah, and ice cream. Yum. The food was pretty good, but the best part was that it was free! I've been spending money like I am the government, not just a government employee so to have a free lunch kicks butt. Someone mentioned that typically they have parties like this a couple times a year and the employees have to pay a small amount but this time there was no charge; the managers (team leaders? I’m not sure of the proper vernacular) apparently paid for it or something. I'm thinking petty cash or something like that. I met some of the other staff members of "Special Materials" (oh yeah, this was a SpecMat party, not a MBRS party and certainly not a LOC party) who seem to not be so much on the odd side as some of the other catalogers I've met. Or maybe my stuffed belly altered my perceptions.

Workwise, we spent more time in the morning doing the CD cataloging and then, after the party, got our first chance to head down to the MBRS reference room and get started on our second project. For that project, we are supposed to find record labels that are not complying with the copyright depositing. So, basically, that requires a lot of Internet searching. First, we try to find labels - the preference is small labels, only because most of the larger labels seem to be aware of copyright registering and depositing. After we find some viable candidates, we simply try to find their catalog of titles and compare that with our library catalog to see if the items are in the Library or not. There is also an 'in-processing' database to consult to see if the items have been sent in recently and are just not processed. It can be interesting work, I suppose. I already found one label that doesn't seem to be complying - Estrus Records. Not that I know of them or really any of the bands on the label, but nonetheless, they aren’t complying… Sucks for them.

That was pretty much my Tuesday in a nutshell. I'm also trying to figure out how to check-out books AND I'm trying to get an answer regarding "credit" hours, which basically means working late one day and leaving early another day, not to be confused with "credit" hours earned towards a degree, of course.

June 13

A new week, a new job. Today we started our jobs in our divisions. For me, that meant Special Materials cataloging. AKA SpecMat, which sounds so much cooler. On a normal day, I will be splitting my time between Special Materials cataloging and Recorded Sound but for the first day, I spent all day training in Special Materials. Specifically what we did was go through what is called the "Retro" CD collection to see if these CDs were in the Library's Voyager cataloging system. We pulled up MARC records and modified them when necessary (added certain fields and corrected grammar mistakes). It also involves processing the CDs by putting various labels and stickers on them. These CDs have been sitting around for like 15 years or so relatively unprocessed. If someone showed up at the Library wanting to listen to one of them, the CDs would have been grouped only by record label. Presumably, they are by number within that label but there were no bar codes or numbers or any type of access information put on them by the Library itself.

So, we each were assigned a trainer (or mentor, I think, is the word they used) and mine is someone named Cindy or Tran, depending on who you talk to… She is Asian and although very nice, her English is a little lacking so I spent the morning totally frustrated by what she was trying to tell me. She also seems to be in a very big hurry, which added to the frustration. I’m by no means a slow worker but when I’m just starting to learn something new, I think most people agree with me that slower is better. There is basically a process to follow when we get each CD but Cindy/Tran seemed to do each one differently. I soon found out she’s only been here a year, too, which might seem like a long time but in the grand scheme of the Library of Congress, that’s ridiculously new. Most people have been here like 20 or 30 years and I’m not exaggerating. One guy in the Motion Pictures division joked that he was a newbie and he’s been around 8 years. It’s really kind of crazy how long the average tenure is, but I suppose once you are at the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, where else would you go?

Anyway, after lunch, I devised a new tactic and asked Cindy/Tran to do a bunch of records while I just watched and learned and took some notes. Soon, I totally understood the process and was left alone to work on it the rest of the afternoon and I rolled along. Phew. I know I’m not a total idiot but in the morning there, I was starting to feel like one.

Apparently, we are allowed to listen to CDs when we want to… however, none of the music I had in front of me looked the least bit interesting. It was nothing I ever heard of and nothing I really wanted to. Oh yeah, and I didn’t bring my headphones. Bummer. I'm not going to forget those again.

June 11 & 12

Over the weekend, I wasn't really sure what to do to occupy my time but I mostly spent it driving around checking out different areas near my home. Saturday, I drove around and walked around Old Town Alexandria, which is a historic district. There also are some shops and lots of restaurants. It was a neat area. Most of the history there involves the Robert E. Lee family, it seems. Washington put in some time there as well. On Sunday, I drove in the other direction and basically checked out areas in Arlington, Baileys Crossroads, Ballston, Falls Church and umm, I think that's about it. Nothing historical there - mostly I checked out what stores and restaurants were on the major drag - Leesburg Pike. Every imaginable chain store is found on this road - some of them twice. I saw a fairly large number of single-family homes, too, which was basically a first for my week in DC. I guess the actual District has a bunch of townhomes, row homes, that sort of thing, which I've seen while walking around the Hill at lunchtime and are likely single-family homes, but for the most part, the areas of Alexandria and Arlington that are nearby me consist entirely of apartment complexes. Apartment buildings on top of apartment buildings on top of apartment buildings. Okay, maybe some are considered condominiums, but it all looks the same to the casual observer.