Greetings!

As a Library Science student at Indiana University, Bloomington, one of my requirements is to take an internship for credit (S605).  The purpose of this blog is two-fold: first, to document anything interesting about my internship through journal entries; second, to provide reflections on articles I have read that pertain to my areas of interest and the internship.  These articles will talk about issues in Russian and East European librarianship, understanding maps, metadata issues, and digital libraries.

My internship consists of 180 hours of work at the Governement Information, Maps, and Microform Services in Wells Library at Indiana University, Bloomington.  Because of my dual Masters program in Russian and East European Studies and Library Science, I am working with the Soviet Red Army Map Collection.  This partial collection came to Indiana University from the Library of Congress.  Because these are duplicates from their collection, it is by no means complete. They are fine example of topographic maps, which means that they depict the terrain, enable the user to determine coordinates, elevations above sea level, and relative elevations of particular points or areas.

As an intern, my job will be to scan the maps (using a very expensive, state-of-the-art scanner!), examine and try to solve metadata issues, and add relevant data to each map.  Eventually, the collection will be available on-line on the university's library web-page.

I'm very excited to have the opportunity to work with such a cool collection!