Monday, November 28, 2016

Getting to Know TS Law Librarians: Pat Sayre-McCoy


1. Introduce yourself (name & position).

I’m Pat (Patricia) Sayre-McCoy, Head of Law Cataloging and Serials at the D’Angelo Law Library, University of Chicago.



2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?

Not really anymore. I am very much involved in our Law School institutional repository, Chicago Unbound—my staff adds new issues of Law School publications, such as the Law School Announcements, and the alumni magazine, the Law School Record. This requires computer skills, such as editing documents and photos, adding metadata, and creating links to individual sections of the issue. We’re going to rename ourselves in Cataloging as soon as we come up with a good name; for now my copy catalogers are Metadata Assistants.



3. What are you reading right now?

I tend to read multiple books at the same time as I either lose/temporarily misplace a book or decide I’m in the mood for something else. For work, Digital rights management edited by Catherine A. Lemmer and Carla P. Wale just arrived in my In-box. For fun, I just started Laura Anne Gilman’s fantasy novel, Silver on the Road, about a fantastical US wild west in the early 1800s.



4a.If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?

I’d love to work at the Field Museum library or any other natural history library. I have a degree in Physical Anthropology and studied human and primate evolution. I love bones! Also, working in a natural history library, I could put some of my rather obscure knowledge to use. However, one of the reasons I wanted my current position is because I love serials cataloging—it’s like a puzzle and working in a law library you really learn serials! And the people at the D’Angelo Law Library are so great to work with. It would be hard to find a better group anywhere.



4b. You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?

I have a lot of procedures to document and I’d probably get to work on them. The IR is relatively new to us and I don’t have all the procedures worked out yet. And then for a break from procedures, I could catalog some of the new faculty podcasts and videos that have been posted by the Law School. I really like to catalog them because some of our professors are great speakers with a good sense of humor. And I learn lots of new things from the podcasts.



Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Fall Fashion from .gov: A New Look for the Library of Congress and a New View of Government Open Source Projects

New York Fashion Week Fall 2007: Doo Ri
Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/artcomments/382733093

Cold weather inevitably means trading out summer garb with new looks and new fashions for autumn and winter, and this year .gov is getting in on the action with a huge homepage redesign for loc.gov as well as the launch of a new repository site for federal agencies open source projects that gives us a peek behind the curtain at their custom codes.  So let’s celebrate our own mini .gov fashion week with a closer look at both of these projects as they strut down the catwalk…

Library of Congress Homepage Redesign

The web team at the Library of Congress has been hard at work transitioning their online collections into a new, more consistent format that’s both mobile friendly and allows for faceted searching. To help promote and encourage access to all of this content, they’ve created an entirely new homepage for loc.gov that is more dynamic and offers more ways to highlight their extensive collections, services and programs. 

Highlights include:
  • A top carousel that displays topical content and will be updated monthly
  • A trending section that includes top searches, recently published blog posts and featured items
  • A section about “Your Library” that gives you information for planning a visit, provides access to online reference services, and lists current exhibitions and upcoming events
  • A free to use and reuse section towards the bottom of the page that features items from the digital collection that are freely available for you to use in your own projects
To learn more about the homepage, check out their recent blog post or go directly to the new homepage.

Code.gov

The White House Office of Management and Budget recently launched code.gov to serve as a repository for federal agencies’ open source projects and to serve as a one-stop shop for exploration, improvement and innovation on the existing code for a variety of government platforms. The code and resources on this site can also be used by other government agencies to assist in implementing new policies, designing metadata schemas to build code inventories, and creating successful open source projects.

The code of this site is a part of the new federal source code policy, which requires agencies to release at least twenty percent of their custom code as open source. Currently, there’s almost fifty different projects available, organized by agency, and more will be added in the coming months.

To learn more about this project, check out fedscoop.com’s recent post or go directly to the site itself.