GSLIS master’s student Lindsay Shapray has been selected to participate in the highly competitive 2015 Library of Congress (LoC) Junior Fellows Summer Intern Program. She will spend ten weeks working full time on-site in Washington, DC, at the LoC’s John W. Kluge Center, which works to bring together scholars and political leaders.
The Kluge Center is a great fit for Shapray, who has experience working in research and information management in the legal sector as a legal assistant at the Chicago office of the firm Korein Tillery. At GSLIS she is pursuing the Specialization in Data Curation, and her interests include research, digital technologies, and social sciences in academia and the public sector, with a particular interest in the intersections of information and technology with culture, policy, and law. She currently holds a graduate assistantship with the University Library’s Business Information Services section and a graduate hourly position with the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS) repository.
“I am driven by a desire to help others harness information resources and technologies to advance knowledge and the public interest. The chance to work at the Library of Congress, and the Kluge Center in particular, seemed like a great fit for my background and my future goals,” Shapray said.
Her primary project this summer will involve researching the operations of and programs offered by major residential research centers worldwide. She will create a system for constructing queries about the centers’ operations, conduct foundational research, and ensure that the collected data is accessible and usable. Shapray will give a presentation on her work at the end of the program.
“I hope to make a meaningful contribution to the Kluge Center that will assist the staff in their future work. I also look forward to learning more about the ways that employees of the Library of Congress have made an impact on the public and overcome challenges facing the institution and the federal government in general, said Shapray. “I hope this program will contribute to my professional development through opportunities to learn from my colleagues, hone my skills, and gain insight into a range of possibilities for my own career path in the future,” she said.