During this past spring and summer, the Hispanic Division recruited a multicultural group of fellows, interns and work- study employees to work on arrearage reduction (uncataloged materials), bibliographic projects, acquisitions and reference services.
These youths from many parts of the world worked with materials in Spanish, Portuguese, Gallego (the language of Galicia, Spain) and English, gaining valuable insight into the workings of the world's largest research library.
- Daisy Lake, a Fulbright grantee from Antigua, West Indies, is a librarian and the supervisor of her country's libraries. She is spending six months in the Hispanic Division, where will learn about the Caribbean holdings in various division in the Library and also about technical processing.
Ms. Lake assists patrons in the Hispanic Reading Room and is compiling a comprehensive bibliography on Antigua, which she plans to publish. She recently gave presentation about her country's archives and libraries at a noon roundtable sponsored by the Library of Congress Professional Association.
- Ricardo Soto, a senior from Tulane University, whose home is in Puerto Rico, is the first person to fill the Hispanic Internship, funded by AT&T. He worked with Reynaldo Aguirre, senior bibliographer, on classifying the Puerto Rican Pamphlet Collection and assisted in compiling a bibliography of Hispanics in the United States. In addition he helped Specialist in Hispanic Culture Georgette Dorn in searching Hispanic-American publications produced in the United States for a Hispanic Collections overview.
- Madison Junior Fellow Laura LaBauve, of Spanish and French ancestry, is from New Orleans. She is a doctoral candidate in Spanish literature at Georgetown University's School of Languages and Linguistics and spent the summer helping Mexican Specialist Barbara Tenenbaum and Mexican and Central American Bibliographer Juan Manuel Perez in classifying and searching thousands of Hispanic periodicals from the Serial and Government Publications Division arrearage. She also worked with Georgette Dorn to preserve the voice recordings in the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape.
- Native Californian Roberta Chaves, a senior at Stanford University, spent her spring quarter in Washington in the Hispanic Division. She helped Acquisitions Specialist Edmundo Flores in compiling an annotated bibliography of publications about Puerto Rico and also researched her senior honors thesis on "Anglo-Hispanic Relations in California in the Nineteenth Century."
- Spanish philologist and linguist Marta Castro Arue, from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, is a native speaker of Gallego. She helped Ieda Siqueira Wiarda in compiling a comprehensive Gallego bibliography of LC holdings.
- Also from Spain came Irene Martinez, a student at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. She assisted Edmundo Flores in compiling a Puerto Rican bibliography.
- Spanish historian Clotilde Puertolas, who holds a doctorate from the Univesity of California at San Diego, proofread and verified online records for LC's The Handbook of Latin American Studies.
- The Handbook also had the assistance of Argentine Mercedes Peralta de Castellini, a volunteer who input serial articles into the Handbook's online data base.
- Scott Hutson, a Yale Univesity junior, spent the summer working with the Hispanic serial arrearages, and classifying and listening to tapes in the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape. He said that listening to the voices of major writers was "a truly unique experience."
- Sean McGuire, a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, came in one day a week to assist the Handbook staff.
- Sixteen-year-old Kennia Alvarez, a Guatemalan who is a sophomore at the School without Walls in Washington, D.C., worked on the Handbook under the sponsorship of the D.C. Summer Youth Employment Program.
- Johnny Battle Jr., 15, was also sponsored by the Youth Employment Program and worked in the Hispanic Reading Room.
- Sandra Quintanilla has been working for the Handbook as a work-study since July 1992 as part of her school curriculum. She graduated in May of 1993 from High Point High School with honors. Originally from El Salvador she has lived in the United States for the past nine years.
- The division's most recent work-study employee is Leandro Lucini. A native of Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Lucini has lived in the Washington metropolitan area for the past five years. For the past three years he has been listed in Who's Who in American High School Students and has been a member of the National Honor Society. A student at the Takoma Park Academy in Maryland, Leo plans to study either engineering or occupational therapy.
Leandro Lucini came to work at the Library as part of his high school curriculum in August.
