Making Good Progress on Subject Headings

 Log 4

Student: Austen Esch

Supervisor: Shelley Barba

 

February 17, 2025

I am sitting at my primary desk in the computer lab as I work on subject headings. While wearing a hat complies with the dress code, I decided to go hatless for this day.

              As always, I work on the subject headings in Excel. I am getting really close to finishing this first batch of subject headings. While the required revisions have been relatively simple at the beginning, the process of making them Library of Congress compliant continues to become more complicated. In several instances, I have to make calls on whether an LCSH term is a suitable substitute for a subject heading entered by the author. Shelley has previously indicated that she would like me to add subject headings if there were fewer than three originally entered by the author. However, she changed her mind and told me that it might be a more complicated process than she had initially thought. She and I discussed the issue, and we decided that I would only try to make the existing subject headings Library of Congress complaint.

After working for a while, Shelley says she wants to introduce me to some employees at the main library. We travel across the library to another section of offices that we briefly looked at during my first tour of the library. Once there, we enter one of the offices, which is shared by three employees, including a library associate who works under Shelley, Magregor McCarley. He is young, having graduated in 2022 with his master’s degree in Library Science at UNT. After meeting with him, Shelley tells me that he had previously moved away to work in Houston before returning to Lubbock to apply at the Texas Tech library. Next, she attempted to introduce me to Matt McEniry, who I am going to meet with on Friday because Shelley is going to be absent from work. However, when we went by his office, it looked like he had already left for the day. Shelley apologizes because I will now have to meet him for the first time on Friday without her.

 

February 19, 2025

I am taking a bit of a break from working on the computer. I decided to stand next to the window so I could look out and see the sun.

              As always, I begin working away with the Excel document's subject headings. However, I suddenly noticed that the row number on the left side of Excel does not align with the numbers I have on my Word document where I am recording the changes I am making. I began to somewhat panic because of how many subject headings I'd completed without any idea of where I might have got off. After calming down from my panic, I go line by line on my Word document, comparing it with the Excel sheet. Every line in Word is consistently one number off from that in Excel. Of course, I continued to assume this was because I had messed up somewhere; otherwise, the numbers on my Word document and the Excel sheet should match up. I manage to work myself halfway up until I decide to jump to the top to see if I got that correct since everyone so far has been of a single number. This is where I discovered that the problem is that I started with number 1 when listing the rows in Word, but the Excel sheet begins with number 2 because the titles of the columns fill the number 1 row. It is fair to say that this was a learning experience that taught me to thoroughly check the situation before stressing myself out.

Later, Shelley came to talk with me and made sure that I remembered that she would not be there on Friday. She confirmed with me that I will be meeting with Matt McEniry as well as going to the special collections library for a more in-depth tour. Shelley tells me that being a special collections librarian had been her initial dream career, but eventually, she settled on being the theses and dissertations curator. Shelley also shared with me an email conversation between her and one of the reference librarians so that I can see she has reached out to other librarians to see if I can meet with them. Because I told her I didn’t know what type of librarian I wanted to be, she believes my interning at a library is a good opportunity to experience the different types of librarianship available. I greatly appreciate this opportunity to learn first-hand the responsibilities of all different kinds of librarians.

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