The following is a guest post from Pamela Barnes Craig, retiring Instruction/Reference Librarian in the Law Library of Congress. It is cross posted on Teaching with the Library of Congress.
Describe what you do at the Library of Congress and the materials you work with.
Pam Craig talks with teachers at the 2013 Summer Teacher Institute
My title is Instruction/Reference Librarian in the Law Library, and it describes pretty much what I do. My primary responsibility is answering questions about legislation, the legislative process, and the legal aspects of a variety of topics. I teach the same subjects to a variety of audiences both in-person classes and webinars. Additionally, I teach how to conduct legal research. Doing legal research is different from other subject areas for several reasons. One important piece is most legal publications, like laws and court cases, are published in chronological order. I teach researchers how to use the digests and codes to find the citation numbers for the legal materials they are seeking.
I work with legal and legislative materials, like federal and state laws, court cases, administrative regulations, and congressional documents. These materials date from the earliest periods of law