This past week was Spring Break at the University of Michigan. So I decided to skip the trip to the beach and instead go to Washington DC to work 9-5 for a week. Really.
My school, the School of Information, has this neat program called Alternative Spring Break where students can go work with some really cool organizations in Washington DC, New York, or Chicago. It is an opportunity to go discover if you actually enjoy doing what you are in Graduate School full-time to learn (my words, not theirs). Also, it is a wonderful networking opportunity; I met some really great people last week and whether or not they can help me find a job is secondary.
I specifically worked for the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy. This is basically the “think tank” for the ALA Washington office. The Washington office also has the people in the Office of Government Relations; the people that go out there and make sure that the libraries’ perspective is heard on Capitol Hill. It is a really important perspective: who else are as big of proponents of open access to knowledge for all people? who else guards your privacy to such a great degree? Librarians are wonderful people to have on your side, but watch out if you do something wrong.
My time at the OITP involved writing a report about the HathiTrust, an endeavor originating at the University of Michigan and the University of Indiana. It is, in the most simple of terms, a long-term digital works preservation project. It is preserving and providing access to all of the digital scans that are being given to the various member Universities from the Google Book Search scannning program and also the libraries’ internal scanning operations. But there are some important implications of the HathiTrust, and that is what I set out to find. I want to give special thanks to John Wilkin, Executive Director of the HathiTrust, for answering my many questions.
