10/01/13 10:00am to 4:00pm 47 hours
The government shutdown did not affect my internship that much. Since the library/archive is privately funded, it was open, and I went in to process some more. M was out, but the person who is technically in charge of the archive was in, so she let me into the back room. I then started on my work.
It turned out that the government shutdown did affect my work enough. Some of the fields that we fill out in PastPerfect include creator, people, and subjects. To make things official and to preserve a standard vocabulary, we use LC Authorities for their name and subject headings. Thanks to the shutdown, the Library of Congress website was down. Along with their catalog and authorities.
Thus came my challenge: to make nice sounding subject headings and name headings, using biographical websites (preferably not Wikipedia). I had learned about assigning subject headings back in my technical services class, but we used LC Authorities. I knew how they tended to form them, at least with names (last name, first name, birth year-death year). I could, in theory, find these people and get their years, and create their headings. Subjects were going to be even less precise, as they tend to get more detailed, depending on how you do it.
I tried. I don't think I did a horrible job. But just because someone might have published something does not mean that there is a biographical page for them on Biography, or even Wikipedia. So often I had to leave the years off for people. Even worse was when I was doing subject tags for institutions. How exactly do you form them? Sometimes LC likes the years; other times, they seem to assume that a name change is enough, with a note that the name has changed somewhere on the MARC record. By the end of the day, I was getting why folks copy catalog off Authorities. Also, I wanted to kick Congress and make them agree on a budget so I could get the site back. Hopefully next week?
