The following is a guest post by Alexander Salopek, a collection development specialist in Collection Services Division.
While at home due to the current circumstances, I have found myself deeply missing the Library’s collections; something close to my heart. Thankfully, I was able to work with the collections through the By the People project. By The People allows individuals to transcribe and tag digitized images of manuscripts and typed materials from the Library’s collections. The transcribers are making these materials available to those who can’t read them or aren’t fully sighted, and to make them full-text searchable. The collection I was working on was “My Great Mass of Papers”, the collection of Teddy Roosevelt’s papers at the Library of Congress. It was exciting because I was reading documents from when he was the President of Police Commissioners in New York, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Governor of New York. One letter particularly caught my attention and I wanted to share some of the journey it took me on.
