So the past few days have been busy - not because there have been a mass amount of researchers, but because I've been trying to answer questions that come in via email and the "Ask a Librarian" system on the LOC website. As the questions come into our division, our boss delegates questions to each member of the reference staff so we all can help answer them in a timely manner. (I think two or three days is the average response time)
On Thursday, I had three different questions to answer- all requiring me to head back into the stacks for some answers. The first one, and probably the most straightforward, was a USMC historian asking for the exact date that a Marine was awarded his Medal of Honor by President Coolidge. The historian gave a date range of three months in 1928. To get the exact date, I had to go back through Coolidge's presidential papers and retrieve his appointment books from 1928 and then flip through the pages until I found the date: June 9th.
The second inquiry I had was regarding a much more recent archive: the Samuel Dash papers. If you don't know who he is (I didn't...), he's a famous lawyer, most noted for being chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee during Watergate. A researcher who last visited in 2012 emailed to ask us to find a document from the Enron Senate Hearings in 2002. Unfortunately, the box number given to me by the researcher did not contain the document - and I checked three times. To be sure that I had the correct box, I looked up when exactly the researcher was in the Reading Room in 2012 and then went and found the call slips from 2012 to check which boxes he had requested. Sure enough, it was the box I had already thoroughly combed through. Thankfully, after a tedious internet search, I was able to find the document online through a government publication website.
Third, a patron had emailed to ask for copies of a specific letter from January 4, 1778 concerning provisions for the Continental Army. For this, I was only given a vague idea of which collection contained this document and the sender and recipient. The Manuscript Division's finding aids are quickly becoming my new best friend in searches like this, because they list the contents of each container of a certain collection in enough detail to help you know which box, or microfilm reel in this case, will have what you're looking for. For an interesting example, you can check out the Abraham Lincoln Papers finding aid here: http://rs5.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/2009/ms009304.pdf.
So after consulting the finding aid, I then was able to narrow my search down to one reel of microfilm (which is still quite a bit) and from that had to read the microfilm until I was able to find the exact letter needed. This was a case where there were a slew of letters all written on the same day by similar people about the provisions for the army, so when in doubt, copy it all and send it to the patrons to figure out. :)
After all this, I was on the desk later that afternoon, and needless to say, when I got home I was exhausted both physically and mentally from all the fact-finding. Thankfully these questions are helping me to a) get into the collections themselves and b) learn how the collections are organized and the resources available to navigate them. Every question I am assigned always brings about a learning experience - which hopefully means by the end of the summer, I'll be familiar with at least some of the material, finding aids, and resources in the Manuscript Division!
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