Rachel Kaufman, freelance reporter » Blog

Lessons From the Library of Congress for Researchers

Rachel — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:19:27 +0000

Three buildings, two librarians, and six hours into my first “real” Library of Congress visit, I’m no closer to getting the research done that I wanted to do.

When you’re doing science writing it’s only common sense to look at the literature that’s out there. Most of the time I can access the academic journals I need through Google Scholar (bless you Google) or through the public libraries here (rarely) or my alma mater’s library system (even more rarely, but sometimes they do come through).

Last week I came upon a journal article that I couldn’t find through any of these sources. Worldcat (another great resource) told me that I could either go to Bethesda or the Library of Congress. The LoC seemed like it made more sense—after all, I already had a borrower’s card from a different, abbreviated adventure a few months ago.

Well….refer back to the lede if you’re wondering how that went.

Based on my “adventure” I’d like to share what I’ve learned with anyone else out there considering doing research at the monster of a library that is the LoC.

See, the Library of Congress is confusing, and not just because of their filing system (though that’s confusing enough—will someone please explain to me why it’s superior to Dewey?). It’s spread out over three buildings. They have strange and unfamiliar policies (mandatory coat check). And most of their material is a) not accessible to the general public and b) not where their catalog says it is.

First of all, you need a borrower’s card. I mentioned I already had one; this was a pretty painless process where you go to the registration room, get your picture taken, and promise not to steal any books (please don’t steal rare books from the LoC!) and your card is printed posthaste. If you plan on heading into the stacks right away, hit up the coat check next to the registration room and leave everything there. You’re allowed one small plastic bag (they will provide it) to hold your wallet, phone, pencil, whatever. You’re allowed a laptop. You’re not allowed a laptop bag. This is probably to prevent people from walking out with priceless items, or to prevent klutzes like me from turning around and knocking stacks of books off their shelves with an errant backpack. Or both.
Go to the main reading room. I don’t care what the card catalog said. I even checked with a librarian online before heading over and asked “What building should I use? Which room?” He (or she?) told me to go to the periodical reading room, which turned out to be wrong. No slight against any of the LoC librarians. It’s a very complicated place. So just go to the main reading room and let a librarian help you figure out where you need to be. They have about eight million separate catalogs depending on what you’re looking for (and what search privileges you have) so you shouldn’t even try to make sense of this unless you have a degree in information theory.
Bring a book…or two. Once you’ve determined the material you need, you fill out a slip and a librarian goes dashing into the stacks to retrieve it. Since the collection is spread out over three buildings this could take a long time. I was told 30 minutes for my first request, and that turned out to be accurate. I was told 45 minutes for my second request and I waited more than two hours. The reading rooms (more like waiting rooms since you do more of that) are equipped with blazingly fast free wifi, but no power outlets that I could find.
If you only need one or two articles, this process probably isn’t worth your time. Once you get there, go through the coat check, walk to the reading room you need, fill out the request form, etc etc etc you’ve eaten the better part of an hour, and that’s before you got any work done. I think I’ll use the Library of Congress only when I need at least 5-10 articles.
Sometimes…the stuff just isn’t there. Two separate requests came back “not in stacks” which means….who knows? It could be that somebody else requested the journal, or that the issue was taken to be bound, or that it was bound but never returned to the stacks, or that it’s lost….the only thing you can do then is ask for a “special search” which takes, I was told, up to a week. (Ouch!) Turns out you can alleviate some of this madness by searching the catalog online and placing holds on the material. You can only place a hold on the material if you’ve set up an online account with the Library of Congress. You can only set up an account if you’ve been given a temporary password by showing up in person, so consider doing this on the same day you get your ID card. I suppose it would be possible to call and ask very nicely for the temporary password but probably you have to be there in person. So if you have your card but didn’t get the account set up on the same day, which is what happened to me, you’re SOL.
Oh yeah…and the building has an employee cafeteria that is open to the public in the underground tunnel linking the main building with the Adams building. It’s not very good, but it is cheap. There is apparently a better cafeteria on the 6th floor, which I will use next time I am there.
Last…turns out librarians are fascinated by ketchup. At least three people commented on my shirt, an unusually high ratio even for a shirt that is known as a conversation starter.
Last for real: Are there any academic libraries in DC that provide access to their online databases to non-students? I would pay a small fee for guaranteed access to JStor, ScienceDirect, etc. I would pay a larger fee for remote access (my alma mater’s library has remote access for some journals for alumni, but not all, and figuring out which ones are covered is a pain). Maybe I can enroll in a night class and then just never go. Seriously. All suggestions entertained.

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The Ultimate High School Curriculum

Rachel — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:13:30 +0000

Inspired by The Oatmeal’s fantastic take on high school classes I began thinking about what the most useful classes I took in high school were.

Besides the hard science courses, which have turned out to be serendipitously useful (but I really can’t suggest everyone run out and take physics just because they might decide to be a science writer one day), the course that I’ve used most in my daily life was civics. Knowing how the government works has made living in this country so much more enjoyable. I’m glad I can turn on the news and understand basic stuff like how a bill becomes a law. It means that I can have decently intelligent conversation at parties (forget that “never talk about politics” rule, it doesn’t apply in DC). It means that I feel slightly less helpless when reading about a piece of legislation I don’t like. But only slightly. This is DC after all.

The point being: civics class makes life richer. I’m sure basic understanding of history, literature, and science does the same, and I’m glad I took all those classes, but I’m most glad I was forced to take government.

If I had to design a high school curriculum, it would include, in addition to basic reading, writing, and math, the following courses. Perhaps this list will generate controversy among anyone who remembers their high school basket weaving class fondly, but you can make your own list. This is mine:

Government
20th Century World History
Personal Finance (Credit cards, mortgages, and what health insurance is and how it works)
No, You Can’t Wear That To A Job Interview
Public Speaking/How To Use Powerpoint Correctly
How To Get Things Done Instead Of Working On Your Blog

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Taking My Own Advice: BACKUP!

Rachel — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:49:09 +0000

I almost lost my entire blog last week.

Something (I have theories about what) somehow managed to corrupt my WordPress database, erasing every entry since 2008. That’s pretty much all my clips and everything “important.”

My webhost apparently makes automatic backups of the database but deletes them after only a few days. I didn’t notice the problem until it was too late, so the auto-backups were no use (they were backups of the corrupted database).

Luckily, the last time I ran WordPress Automatic Update, I did what I normally don’t bother to do: download the backups the plugin automatically creates for you.

Those backups were two weeks old, but they were blessedly uncorrupted. I was able to restore everything but what I’d written in the past two weeks, and manually re-post everything from those two weeks.

I am a fanatic about backing up my computer after a spectacular hard drive failure a few years ago: I have Mozy set up to back up 2 gigs of what I consider most important, plus Dropbox keeps cloud copies of everything I’ve worked with recently, and on top of all that, Time Machine for everything else.

But until I almost lost my blog I was very sloppy about backing it up. Because, hey, it’s in the cloud. It’s fine.

Apparently that’s not so true. The moral of the story is: wherever you keep your data, back up your shit.

The failure, by the way, was traced by my sysadmin to be a failure of the WordPress Automatic Update plugin that had (tangentially) created the backup in the first place. There’s no reports from other folks who have had this problem, but it seems that WPAU was deprecated when neither of us were looking and a similar function was integrated into the WP core. Yeah, but nobody mentioned that the plugin should no longer be used, so can we be blamed for missing the memo?

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Off to Austin, See You There!

Rachel — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:33:58 +0000

I fly out to Austin for SXSW tomorrow, a day early, but then the craziness starts in earnest soon after. Heading down? Hit me up on Twitter and maybe we’ll meet up.

I wasn’t super excited about a lot of the proposed panels at first, but with a little digging I’ve found a significant number of events that will really make the most of my Gold pass.

I’m going to attempt to attend the following:

And that’s just the first day and a half or so! Definitely can’t wait. See you there!

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You Wanna Write A ‘Me Too’ Story? Fine, But Get Your Own Sources

Rachel — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 20:07:52 +0000

This blog is turning into a place to vent. Today I want to vent about poaching sources.

A few times I’ve been contacted by people saying very nice, flattering things about something I’d written lately, followed by “can you tell me who you talked to to write the story because I’m doing one on the same topic?”

It’s often journalism students who are doing this, which I have mixed feelings about: on the one hand, they’re just students, so they don’t know any better…on the other hand, they’re students, so they should know better. I don’t usually respond to these things.

A couple weeks ago I was contacted by an actual working reporter who wanted me to give her the personal e-mail addresses of two people I spoke with for an article. Uh, no?

Here’s the thing. The request was strange to begin with. The people she wanted to reach were “just” average folks, plucked mostly at random. If you do any amount of local reporting you see this a lot: a national story is, well, localized… by talking to local people. If you’re going to do a story based on something another journalist has written, those local people can be basically anyone. You might need Hilda Solis specifically for an unemployment story, but you could talk to any number of people standing outside the employment office waiting for their checks.

So it was weird that this reporter wanted to speak with these specific “average” people. But the request was worded so politely and I felt…well, bad for her. So I told her, look, I doubt they’ll be interested, but I will send them an e-mail and say they can contact you if they are interested. Otherwise, I recommend….. and then I listed a number of places where she could go to find other similarly-minded people.

This is, other journos will attest, far above and beyond the call of duty. I sure as hell wouldn’t expect anyone else to be as kind if I tried to poach their sources. (Which pretty much is what this is.) (Side note: I write tons of “me too” stories—it’s basically impossible to have a new idea, anyway—but I at least try to add something new rather than re-interview the same people on the same topic.)

Fast forward a week or so: The same reporter contacts me again. This time she’s evidently on deadline as her tone is much different: she essentially says: “give me their e-mail addresses.” Straight up.

I sent her a (perhaps too) sharply-worded response. Was I mad? Yes. Can you blame me?

The irony of the situation, by the way, is twofold:
First, she’s ensured that I’ll remember her in a negative way if she ever needs a favor again.
Second, the people she was looking for—whose first and last names were printed in the article I wrote—are both incredibly Googlable.

Sigh.

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Testing MacJournal

Rachel — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 21:41:13 +0000

I’m testing out MacJournal, from Mariner Software. It’s an offline blog editing client that works with WordPress and a few other blog hosts. I’m told that it even works with WordPress.com (i.e., you don’t have to have a self-hosted blog to use the client.)

The software is a hefty $40, but there’s a 15-day free trial. We’ll see how this goes.

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Coding, coding, and more coding

Rachel — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:22:47 +0000

I’ve finally gotten my website to a state where I’m happy with it..for now, though in a few months I’m sure the renovation bug will hit me again. Some people buy new curtains, I play with style sheets.

It does give me satisfaction to use that side of my brain, which isn’t always taxed (or at least not this hard) when I’m writing. And I know that being able to code PHP, CSS, and HTML will come in handy for getting gigs–the CSS and HTML certainly didn’t hurt my chances of landing big blogging gigs, which I have. No potential clients have yet asked me to write something in PHP, but I’m sure that day will come. Hopefully not too soon, because I code like a brute: there are a lot of trial-and-error hours, mostly errors, before a page comes together. (Damn you, misplaced semicolons!)

So it’s a skill I’m proud of having, and I always recommend to other journos (when I’m asked, which isn’t often or anything) that they do their own websites too. You don’t have to decide to learn PHP like I did, because you can start a blog on WordPress or Blogger and learn basic HTML that way. It’s free. When you feel like graduating to the next level, $60 a year or so will get you a domain name and a webhost that you can install the “big kids” version of WordPress on. That gives you the option of using a custom theme, either one you design yourself or one that someone else has built. I’m a big fan of Mimbo, which is donationware (pay if you like it).

I may do a series of posts about how to get a portfolio website set up using WordPress, but for now, I’m just happy I still remember how to code.

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Freelance Ethics Part 2

Rachel — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:28:10 +0000

I had the opportunity earlier this month to be a panelist at the Vocus User Conference here in Washington DC. All the flacks wanted to hear what the Future of Media looks like from a freelance perspective…and out of all the freelancers in the DC area, they chose me. I’m humbled.

I’ll be honest with y’all, when they miked me up(!) I was a little nervous, but I think I did pretty well.

The moderator, Vocus’ Bill Wagner, asked a couple questions that got me thinking, though.

Bill wanted to know more about the mediabistro cocktail party I went to last year where an all-too-aggressive PR person wanted to engage in some mutual back-scratching. Essentially, for those who don’t remember (it was a year ago, after all), the flack offered me work writing press releases in exchange for favorable coverage of one of her clients.

I still get the shivers thinking about it.

Anyway, that was on my mind last week when I attended another mediabistro mixer (and I was honestly somewhat dreading that I’d run into this woman again, but I can’t even remember what she looked like at this point).

(Side note: Last year, I’m pretty sure there were a few comped appies. This year, not so much. And they say the media are bouncing back! Pah!)

I was chatting with a freelance friend of mine, saying something like, “Wow, the turnout is so much higher quality than last year–last year I just met sharks.” and explained the issue with the aggressive flack.

He said that that sort of thing happens all the time in the music freelance industry.

I’ve hardly covered music. It’s just not my thing (though I did write about Ted Leo’s new album once), so I had no idea. But his claim is that it’s totally common for a music freelancer to get good coverage for some album and then be offered work writing press releases for that label. The thing about music, I guess, is that much of it is assigned rather than pitched, because a magazine says “Oh, we have to do something about the new Vampire Weekend album” rather than waiting for a writer to say “Hey, I’ve got a feature on a great band nobody’s ever heard of.” Which means, I suppose, that you’re less likely to benefit from having done PR work for a label…other than by getting paid way more than you do for writing a music review. Which is why it’s so tempting.

An informal poll of my journalism and music friends garnered reactions ranging from “Ugh” to “That makes me feel weird but I completely understand it.”

So the issue of ethics and freelance is more thorny than I had initially thought. Sure, there are folks I know who cover both sides (journalism and marketing/PR), and do it well. But the rules are different, it appears, depending on what you’re actually writing about. Surely other beats—like energy policy or something that Actually Matters—frown on freelancers moonlighting for the American Clean Coal Institute.

I’ve done almost no marketing work, though once I wrote a fawning article for an internal company newsletter that paid very well (and gave me a bit of a suntan, as a bonus). I’m not sure how editors feel about writers who work both sides, but I would certainly want to disclose any connections I had before pitching an article to a newspaper or magazine.

I hope that, at least, is standard.

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Social Media Success

Rachel — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:28:17 +0000

As some of you already know, this year I’m making the transition from “writer, editor, and blogger” to “writer, editor, blogger, and author. That’s right. I am gonna sell a book this year, darn it!

As part of that goal, I’ve added a bunch of agent blogs and writing blogs to my RSS reader, figuring I can kill two birds with one stone by doing so: learning more about the publishing industry as well as learning which agents I may want to query, plus getting my name out there by leaving comments/participating in discussions. Win-win situation for everyone.

And now a well-known blogger has asked me to guest post for him! That was fast, as it’s only, uh, 5 days into 2010.

I won’t say who yet because we’re still working out the details, but this is fantastic news!

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Nanowrimo 2009

Rachel — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:05:29 +0000

That’s right, folks, I’ve finished Nanowrimo 2009 with a steampunk story starring the spunkiest wrench wench ever to walk the streets of New Bombay.

Considering the speed at which I churned out either 50,419 words or 50,093 words (depending on whether you believe Nanowrimo’s word counter or Scrivener‘s), I’m actually happy with the way the story came out.

I’ll be taking the month of December off, and then will spend January and February writing Book Two.

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