Educator + Infonista + Historian

As you now know I began my tenure as the interim Curator for Literature and Rare Books by trying to get more familiar with cataloged items in Rare Books and Special Collections by creating a spreadsheet that would give me an overview of the collection as a whole. Technical Services provided me with a MARC file containing the complete MARC records for every item in these collections and pointed me to MARCedit to be able to create a customized report about the collections. Previously I explained how I used MARCedit in Revealing La Revolution: The EnvironmentalScan & MARCedit, Part 1 . Now I’m going to share how I imported and set up my data in Microsoft Excel so that it revealed the contents of Rare Books and Special Collections to me. I began by opening a new workbook in Microsoft Excel and went to the “Data” Menu Ribbon. Excel Data Menu - Import from Text File In the furthest left column I choose to import my data “from text” and directed the request box to the corr...

As the interim Curator of Literature and Rare Books I am writing the Environmental Scan for the French Pamphlet Project. Two tools I have found very useful to help with this are MARCedit and Microsoft Excel (I sort of love spreadsheets). I became familiar with MARCedit over the summer as I attempted to gain intellectual control over my expanded collection responsibilities and learned a new (to me) feature of Microsoft Excel which has proved very useful for putting together this report. So I wanted to tell you a little about what I’ve learned. After I was appointed interim Curator for Literature and Rare Books in May, I requested a report from Technical Services of all catalogued items in Rare Books and Special Collections. I already had a comfortable grasp of the literary manuscript collections but had not had an opportunity to really get to know the Rare Books and Special Collections volumes. In an effort to become better acquainted with these collections, I asked Technical Serv...

I've added a new page to this website! It is titled " Research " and has a summary of the my current research project available on it. I've spent the last year thinking about Digital Teaching Collections. Last summer I undertook some background research about what Digital Teaching Collections would look like on behalf of the Education & Outreach Coordinator in Special Collections and the Digital Programs & Initiatives Manager in Digital Stewardship at the University Libraries. In the spring of 2013, I completed a literature review for Digital Teaching Collections and an IRB to survey UMD humanities and social science faculty about the use of digital resources for instructional purposes as an independent study project. Over the summer I sent out my survey to UMD faculty and compiled the responses. I am currently editing the final draft of my report for University Libraries about what Digital Teaching Collections should be and how they can be implemented into Un...