Wisconsin Historical Society.
From July 2015 to January 2020, I worked as a Serials and Acquisitions Assistant at the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS). There I assisted with collection management for the unique holdings of 3000 active print periodicals from across North America. Working collaboratively on shared daily management tasks and long-term projects, I assisted with a major weeding project, prepared hundreds of ceased titles for long-term storage, processed many title changes and subscription renewals, and tracked a growing number of publications that have gone online for potential Archive-It hosting. I worked extensively with holdings records to ensure accurate reporting in the public UW-Madison library catalog of which volumes and issues we have on site and which are in storage. The titles WHS collects, in many formats--journals, newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, and film--are available to our patrons in the large WHS reading room. Many of these titles are not collected by other libraries and exemplify the WHS mission to “collect, preserve, and share,” in this case from a multitude of voices outside of the mainstream press. As more and more academic libraries consolidate print collections and move them into long-term storage facilities, WHS seeks to maintain these marginal print titles for current and future scholars. Subjects and genres include genealogy, ethnic studies, labor, religion, military and government, contemporary culture, gender studies, social action, politics, collecting/hobbies, archaeology, and more. |
Print Collection Management usAs a student of library science and now a library professional, I have studied many aspects of collection management, including technical services. Included here are descriptions and examples of work I completed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Special Collections and Wendt Commons Library; a cataloging internship at the Association of State Floodplain Managers; a cataloging project in the UW iSchool, where I applied the principles of Resource Description and Access (RDA); and my current position at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Little Magazines Collection. When I was a graduate student in the iSchool, one semester I completed an independent study with Susan Barribeau, English Language Humanities Librarian and Literary Collections Curator at Memorial Library, UW-Madison. In particular, I studied the management of the university's Little Magazines collection, housed in Special Collections in Memorial Library. I considered many aspects of collection management, including how to realize outreach and access through research guides, social media, and the digitization of a portion of the collection through Reveal Digital. I created an extensive LibGuide and also contributed a post to the uwlittlemags tumblr on Helen Van Vechten, perhaps one of the only women printers in Wisconsin before 1900. To cap the semester I designed a poster highlighting the different aspects of collection management and outreach I had studied and presented this poster at the Wisconsin Association for Academic Librarians (WAAL) 2014. Wendt Commons Library. As the Cataloging and Technical Services Student Assistant at Wendt Commons Library (2012-2013), the previous College of Engineering library at UW-Madison, I worked extensively with the daily processing of incoming acquisitions using Voyager. Here is an example of a workflow guide I created for processing serials, analytics, and class separately items; this is part of a larger procedures guide I created to document work steps for students working in this position after me. Association of State Floodplain Managers. As a cataloging intern at the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), I assisted the lead librarian in cataloging a small library of specialized science titles. Working initially in EndNote, we ingested records from a number of source catalogs (including the Library of Congress Online Catalog), and edited the incoming records with the ASFPM user in mind. Later we transitioned to the open source ILS platform, Koha. LIS 651, Cataloging and Classification. For the final project in this course, I cataloged a 1915 University of Wisconsin catalog using RDA and created a cataloging manual with instructions for the application of RDA principles in this instance. |