Reflection on the term as a whole, including your time in Archives. What did you enjoy? What was a challenge? What was surprising? What do you want to learn more about?
I really enjoyed this term spent in RADS and Archives. The biggest highlight for me was definitely the YA collection project, which was both very informative and a really rewarding experience. Every step of the process was fun and engaging for me, from the first steps of selecting which books of Carleton’s collection would be a good fit with my chosen focus, to arranging the final set of books on the shelf. It was especially fun for me to catalog the several new books I had ordered to add to the collection, including the one book (A Kind of Magic by Ryder Phoenix) that didn’t yet have an existing record. It was both interesting and challenging to decide what subject headings to use for those books that didn’t have any (or many). This process shed more of a light on the ongoing subject heading struggle due to the constraints of the Library of Congress subject headings and just deciding which parts of a book get highlighted in the subject headings. Another challenge I faced this term was while working in Archives. My project for the week in Archives was to add to the #ThrowbackThursday posts they release every week by choosing a couple of ideas of interest to me, searching through the Archives’ materials for more information on the subject, and creating a draft of a post. The way materials are cataloged and accessed in Archives is very different from the way books are accessed in the library, so I had to adjust to using it to find relevant items related to my posts. I really enjoyed my time working in RADS, but of course I’m also excited to learn more about the goings on of other departments in the library. Another thing I’m excited for is to see if the use statistics of the books in the YA collection increase at all over the course of the year!