July 28

What a day! First, we were surprised to find out that there was indeed going to be a SpecMat party for the interns at 10:00am. Mention of this had been made weeks ago but it had never been confirmed. So, I had RSVP’d that I would attend an intern-only session on “How Congress Works” – at the same time. Once I found out about the scheduling conflict, they agreed to move the party back an hour so that I could attend since they realized that they had forgotten to inform the interns that the party was even taking place. Miscommunication, how rare. I was really looking forward to the talk because I enjoy political science and I felt like I should go since they had asked us to RSVP about eight times. Normally, they just mention an event and don't ask for an RSVP.

So, the “How Congress Works” session was not your basic ‘How a bill becomes a law' kind of thing but rather sort of a historical perspective on how Congress has actually operated, complete with discussion of some of the better and more innovative Speakers of the House. It was pretty interesting, I thought. Our speaker was from CRS (Congressional Research Service), which is something I’m very interested in as a career path, so he described what they do a little bit (write nonpartisan reports for Congress).

The party was nice – all breakfast-type foods like croissants, muffins, fruit, danishes, etc…. I talked with a few people in that department who I hadn’t talked to before so that was nice. One of the catalogers informed me that the Library refuses to allow any political discussion during elections or really, any time at all. She told me how she went to a Jesse Jackson rally and put that down as her reason for taking time off of work and they told her to just put “personal reasons” and not be so specific. No one is allowed to wear buttons or show political preferences during election season, either. I guess this is all to avoid Congress finding out that someone has a differing viewpoint and refusing to fund programs because of it. Interesting when you think that Congress in general kind of exists because of the political interest of its citizens. As a side note, though, apparently the woman who sat in my cubicle before me was named Maggie Jackson – Jesse Jackson is her cousin.

Besides those two events of the day, the rest of the day was the same old thing. I woke up really early this morning (like 5:15am) to get to work as early as possible since I’m driving back to Cleveland this evening. Long day.

July 27

Thom & I attended this lecture on information architecture, taxonomy and controlled vocabulary. Heady stuff. The speaker was a woman named Denise Bedford. She works at Worldbank and basically described their attempts to build a satisfactory search engine for their users and mentioned some of her findings. I thought it was pretty interesting, although a lot of it went over my head. She talks about some pretty common sensical stuff that is typically overlooked. For instance, she wants her search engine to be able to include misspellings. She pointed out how search engines like Google will ask, "Did you mean..." and then if you click 'yes', well you've lost all the misspelled hits. It's not completely impossible that you can find some relevant information that has a misspelling. Anyway, things like that for 90 minutes is how it went. I was interested to hear about their success with Teragram, which is an information processing software package - basically it's the type of program that was looking to take my indexing/abstracting job away. It lost out to the much cheaper Indian labor force but it sounds like the software has advanced to a point where it is pretty successful and needs only minimal human supervision. Interesting... I'm sure Gale is all over that.

Beyond that, I processed CDs in the morning and tried to find "treasures" in the afternoon, same as usual.

July 26

Nothing much to report really. I listened to a wide variety of music while I diligently processed the CDs in the morning. I didn't keep track but some of the variety was Chet Baker, Three Doors Down, Destiny's Child, Bobby Darin, Shimmer and a rap compilation. I think there was more that seem to have slipped my mind. Umm, but nothing too exciting. Tran finished my tray of brief records and had no comments about mistakes, which makes me happy. I have a lot more brief records ahead of me. It seems that there are more and more of them… I really impressed myself with my diligence today. Doesn't take much to impress me, though…

We got word about an MBRS party for us. It will be some sort of breakfast gathering on August 2nd. Yay! Although I don't really like breakfast food… but you know, if I have a couple bagels I'm good to go for the day. The SpecMat party was supposed to be this Thursday but I haven’t heard anything more specific about that so maybe it’s been postponed (or, God forbid, cancelled!!).

Thom & I went to lunch together and on our way back to work, we ran into Frank Evina in the elevator. Frank is like our Fellowship Master, the man from the Copyright Office who basically organized the whole ‘Junior Fellows Summer Intern’ program. He showed us that he had in his hand the layout for the big press conference next week. Each division will get its own table apparently and the "treasures" we found will be laid out. The press (whatever press there might be - I'm not expecting a whole lot) will walk around and inquire about the given treasures. Simple enough. Gene (the MBRS boss) suggested Thom & I work together on a presentation to give the press. I figure Thom will be all over that - he loves to show off that he knows a lot about music and cataloging and library stuff. Or show off what he thinks he knows, at least. We'll see.

I asked Gene what the Motion Picture interns of MBRS were doing for their “treasures” since they hadn’t really been doing anything in that regard all summer. He said they were looking through copyrighted home videos… Yes, people have copyrighted home videos! But, he said they found some footage of Marilyn Monroe attending some party and also some home footage of jazz singer Nina Simone. How cool is that? I would so much rather be looking at people’s bad video footage than listening to their bad songs. But I guess I should really stop being bitter that I was chosen for Recorded Sound and not Motion Pictures since my time left here is almost in the single digits. Anyway, Frank said there were fascinating discoveries in all the divisions. Again, we'll see.

Oh, and an interesting tidbit: I needed to mail something and I was going to use a LOC envelope, thinking it would be funny to send something in the mail from them... Right on the envelopes, it says "For Library use only, $300 fine for private use." I've never seen such a punishment listed before - people steal office supplies from their work all the time! Needless to say, I just used an envelope brought from home.

July 25

I figured it was going to be a bad day when I missed the bus. I came outside like one minute too late and the bus drove right past me. I had to wait 20 minutes for the next one. Then, we ran into so much traffic on the way to the Metro station that it further delayed my getting to work. THEN, the next Metro wasn't arriving for like 7 minutes, which is ridiculous for rush hour. I finally got to work about an hour later than I had intended when I woke up in the morning. Not fun.

But, back to CD processing in the morning... I was hoping that would be okay because it was what I planned to do anyway (I prefer to divide my days) but I chatted with Gene in the morning and he said it was fine to do that. Thom never came upstairs, though. He "treasure" hunted all day. Ali, the little bugger, had left me some of her CDs to finish, which actually was fine, but of course they were briefs so a little more difficult. I've been doing a lot of briefs lately, which just isn't as fun as the others. I'm getting the hang of them, though, and Tran is back full-time so there isn't any question about who will look over my work. In fact, Tran took my nearly full tray of brief records to look over and I didn't hear back from her about any mistakes yet so I think I'm good to go. She doesn't care as much as temporary trainer Gina did - which is good or bad, depending on how you look at it. Personally, I'm glad I don't have to mark all the contemporary Christian CDs as "gospel" like Gina suggested because that just seems wrong. She looks at them as all the same but I feel like there is a difference. There is no category for contemporary Christian, which is ridiculous because at least 1/3 of all the CDs we process fall into that category. Of course, what do I know?

After lunch, I ran into Ali - who did not go home yet! She was supposed to fly out last night but apparently changed her flight and decided to hang out at the Library to rub it in all of our faces that she is still here but not working.

Anyway, in the afternoon, I tried to find more "treasures" and didn't really find anything today. I sifted through a couple more boxes and found some possibilities so I'll listen to them as the days go on.

July 23 & 24

Another weekend gone and now there are only two more left before my internship ends! My parents & I did our usual family thing - drove around, went to eat and went shopping. We hit pretty much all areas of the DC area, checked out the monuments at night, drove through Georgetown, went to Ikea in College Park, visited Old Town Alexandria, and went to about six (at least) shopping areas. Fun!