The librarian's work consisted mainly of acquiring copies of books, articles, laws and cases, and other published material, and incorporating these into mdag.net. Requests were received by e-mail, phone, fax, and in person. This task required borrowing materials through interlibrary loan as well as travelling to the lending library to pick up material needed immediately or to photocopy non-circulating items. Generally, the process was as follows: Search the Library of Congress Online catalog for a full bibliographic description of the item since often only a cursory or abbreviated citation was received by the librarian. (Several citations for laws had transposed chapter numbers or referred to laws when, precisely speaking, the items were resolutions. This required time to sort out.) Next, online catalogs of nearby libraries with relevant collections were searched to locate a copy of the item that could be obtained within a reasonable amount of time. (Which libraries had relevant material was learned as the work progressed.) Please note that an interlibrary loan also usually required several phone calls, especially when the lending library has to be persuaded to lend an item not usually circulated. American Library Association interlibrary loan forms had to be filled out and faxed, and in some cases, as mentioned above, the librarian had to pick up the item at the lending library to receive it in a timely manner. And the material had to be boxed for return by United Parcel Service or hand carried back to the lending institution.
Our best resources were the Maryland State Law Library, Enoch Pratt Library through the State Government Information Service, which works swiftly and delivers via courier to the State Law Library on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; Nimitz Library at the United States Naval Academy for primary historical sources on microfilm and hardcopy secondary sources, especially history texts, and the following libraries at the University of Maryland: McKeldin Library, College Park; the University of Maryland Law School Thurgood Marshall Law Library; the University of Baltimore Law Library; Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University; and occasionally, the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court Library, and the Department of Justice Library. A few books were purchased through online bookstores, amazon.com or alibris.com.
The other main task for the librarian was incorporating this material into madag.net, which required filling out work orders, keyboarding orders into the State and Local database and updating the entries, and also setting up a subdirectory where the scans would be temporarily stored by Imaging Services . When entire books were scanned, the librarian delivered the material to Imaging Services for scanning on the Zeutschel and retrieved the item. Multi-page tifs were made from the scans by the librarian. For material with fewer pages, the librarian scanned it on a flatbed or feed-through scanner, cleaned up the images, and created multi-page tifs. Full bibliographic descriptions were made in mdag.net, the images uploaded, and hyperlinked to the bibliographic descriptions.
Time was also spend comparing the Westlaw and Lexis legal research online systems, contracting with Lexis, handling problems with the service, as well as learning to use Lexis.com and mdag.net, and mastering scanning on a flatbed and feed-through scanner.
CEA/cea
2/8/2001