Learning the Lingo & Beginning Assignment 1

Raegan Benda, Supervisor: Jennifer Gomez

Tuesday, September 2, 6:30pm - 8:30 pm, Saturday, September 6 9am - 1pm, Wednesday, September 10 3pm - 7pm

Beginning my practicum experience at the Law Library of Congress has been challenging! I am new to librarianship and completing tasks like this completely online. Of my completed ten hours of work thus far, I have spent quite of bit of it reading instructions, orienting myself with the vocabulary of the work, and communicating with my team leaders. I am on of the team who is cleaning out and structuring metadata from congressional bill summaries, to then be uploaded and accessible on the Congress.gov website. It's safe to say I have learned so much already about the process of bills becoming laws, the correct structure of metadata for optimization and the importance of our work as interns. This is an area of librarianship that is different from something I thought was possible, but has surprised me with how much I enjoy it! It is tedious work, but work that will make a difference in the access to important legal information that will be used by patrons from all backgrounds.

Here is a snapshot of me working on creating new metadata for Public Law 151, Congress 52, Session 1. Essentially, I am taking the information from the PDF on the right and plugging it into the spreadsheet on the left.

More than just familiarizing myself with the lingo and the expectations of the internship, I have also started work on my Assignment 1. For this assignment, I am editing the existing metadata for a set of Congressional bills. The existing metadata I have been editing has come from the scanning and uploading of the above pdf into the spreadsheet. When it was originally uploaded, there are areas that must be edited to ensure that when it is put online, it is searchable and can be viewed correctly. I have been updating the spreadsheet to reflect the edits I have been assigned, and have just began the process of creating the new metadata for the rest of the bills that failed to be scanned and uploaded into the spreadsheet. This process is what will take me the longest amount of time, as this is needed for bills 151-224. Once this is completed, I will move on to editing the corresponding .txt files for each bill and ensure the data there matches the data in this spreadsheet. Then, I will be finished with Assignment 1! I'm aiming to have this completed by the end of the week before moving on to Assignment 2, next week!