"All I have learned at the Library of Congress, I will be able to use in our library system now and in the future," said Daisy Edith Lake, Fulbright grantee in the Hispanic Division.
She added that Everette Larson, head of the Hispanic Reading Room, "even taught me a new way of entering manuscripts into the computer." Ms Lake is especially happy about having mastered using the Library's automated data base and having become proficient in the use of personal computers. She went on to say: "My special project for the Fulbright Program was the use of databases on research and information, and my goals were effectively accomplished by the programs Procite, Quattro Pro and WordPerfect."
One of Ms. Lake's contributions was to help Mexican Specialist Barbara Tenenbaum, junior fellow Laura LaBauve, Mexican bibliographer Juan M. Perez and intern Scott Hutson classify Caribbean periodical arrearages.
Ms. Lake is a librarian/documentalist and the supervisor of libraries in Antigua-Barbuda in the West Indies. She was a Fulbright grantee doing research in the Hispanic Division from April to September 1993. During her study tour, she used her newly acquired computer skills by compiling a bibliography of Library of Congress holdings by and about Antigua, in which she includes maps and manuscripts.
"With the increasing awareness of the value of computer technology," Ms. Lake said, "Antigua is making every effort to include computer technology in the curriculum for our high schools and college." She added that "eventually all our government offices and libraries will be fully computerized."
Ms Lake had not expected to see as many maps and charts of Antigua as she did during a briefing by Ronald Grim, head of the Geography and Map Division's Reading Room.
Debra Newman Ham, Afro-American specialist in the Manuscript Division, gave Ms. Lake a tour of the division, where she found a number of documents about Antigua, including more than 900 pages in the John Willis Greensdale Papers.
Ms Lake was also toured the African and Middle Eastern Division, the Children's Literature Center, and the Exchange and Gift Division, where she briefed acquisitions librarian Fehl Cannon before he visited the Anglophone Caribbean on an acquisitions trip.
But Ms. Lake spent most of her time in the Hispanic Division. She is convinced that "it is through doing reference that one learns the most about a library's holdings."
Ms. Lake received a bachelor's degree in library science from the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, in 1976. Subsequently she did an internship at the Kitchener Library in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. She now hopes to return to the United States and study for a master's degree in library science.
She was selected for the Fulbright grant through an internship program that Cole Blasier, former chief of the Hispanic Division, and William Glade, former deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency, worked out in 1989, to bring Latin American and Caribbean librarians to the Library of Congress for study and research. The grant is sponsored by the Fulbright-Hays fellowship program. Through this internship program, the Hispanic Division has hosted librarians from Barbados, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Chile.
