Shift #54 - CRS/Law Library Workshop & Editing
Tuesday, July 23, 2024 | 12-2 pm CST/1-3 pm EST (2 hrs)
Details
Michelle Hurt, student/intern
Jennifer Gonzalez, practicum supervisor
This is a screenshot of our host's presentation. Unfortunately she was having major technical issues so someone else had to run the presentation for a while.
This afternoon, I attended a workshop and also spent time editing one of my blog posts. I've gotten a lot of writing done so it's fine-tuning what I have. The workshop, a nice break from writing and editing, focused on two things - the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Law Library. As I mentioned above, our first host was having issues with her internet connectivity but it got resolved. I learned that the CRS began in 1914 and was founded to provided legislative information to Congress members. In 1970, the CRS was given increased analytic capacity so they could provide more support to committees. Part of the CRS's mission is to serve Congress with the highest quality of research, with values of confidentiality, objectivity, nonpartisanship, authoritativeness, and timeliness. The CRS also has its guiding principles for their work - excellence, integrity, inclusion, innovation, and collaboration. We were also given information about the organizational structure of CRS and the different research divisions within CRS like the American Law Division, Government Finance Division, and the Knowledge Services Group. The CRS also holds DEIA in high regard; this is diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. They have working groups that promote these values including creating working papers on recruitment and retention and workplace inclusion.
The second part of the workshop was about the Law Library. My internship supervisor acknowledged the "funny" nature of having this workshop done way after our internship with the Law Library began. I was okay with another workshop about the Law Library, though; it's been weeks since I started my internship and found the information interesting and useful. The Law Library began in 1832 as a separate department of the Library of Congress to serve the legal research needs of all three branches of the government. It is actually the largest law library in the world, with over 2 million volumes of materials (like federal, state and foreign books, law reports, gazettes, constitutions and serials). The library covers 267 nations and jurisdictions in 140 languages. Related to that, the library has the foreign and comparative law divisions staffed by foreign law experts. They provide research and reference on non-U.S. law and create comparative law reports for Congress. We also learned about resources in the Law Library like the Legal Research Institute, In Custodia Legis (the blog I'm writing for), and law databases. There is so much information within the Law Library that it's hard to fathom that there are even more resources and materials within the Library of Congress in general!
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