The 3-minute interview: Mark Sweeney
Examiner Staff Writer
November 1, 2009
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| Mark Sweeney is the chief of serial and government publications division at the Library of Congress. (Courtesy photo) |
Sweeney is the chief of serial and government publications division at the Library of Congress. He is overseeing the library's Chronicling America project, which is an effort to digitize historic American newspapers and put them online.
What is your job at the library?I'm responsible for a division of about 50 people who work with the library's newspaper collection, our current periodicals, government publications and the library's comic book collection. We care for the material, we build those collections by selecting what item to add to the collection and we organize material so that people can access it. We run a reading room where people can come and ask questions about the collection and conduct their research.
What do people come in and look for?
We have some high-powered researchers that come in and they're working on American history books. ... A lot of people do local history and genealogy research in newspapers. People like their newspapers because they provide not just an obituary, giving the facts of a person's life, they give you this context of what community the person lived in, what stores they shopped at, what organizations they were a part of.
What is the Chronicling America project?
It's a joint program with the National Endowment for the Humanities and 22 states to digitize select historic American newspapers and put them out on the Web. We've got a million and a half pages of digitized newspapers up right now and actually got quite a few from D.C. as well. ... That's what I think is cool about working with those collections because it really unlocks life in a way that really no other single type of publication can do.
Your favorite part of your job?
You see one-of-a-kind type of material. ... Every day there's something new that you've never seen before or never heard of. ... The interests and the people and the collections, it just creates an interesting community that I don't think there are too many places that are quite like it.
-- Melanie Ciarrone
