Metadata Technician: Daina Andries (’09)

The website of the Library of Congress has published an interview with Daina Andries (’09), a metadata technician with the Digital Resources Division of the Law Library of Congress. In it Miss Andries discusses her work at the library — “capturing and reviewing metadata, or data about data, which renders a resource more searchable by supplying identification information about the resource” — as well as her background, which includes a master’s degree in French from the University of Delaware and a master’s of science in information from the University of Michigan.

She also describes her education at Thomas Aquinas College, and how it prepared her for the complex, detailed-oriented line of work that has become her passion. “The curriculum at Thomas Aquinas was rigorous and interdisciplinary. Every class was taught as a seminar, providing practice in critical thinking, reasoning logically from first principles, and grappling with scientific, literary, and philosophical texts held to have shaped Western thought,” she says. This “foundation in logical reasoning and philosophy” helped, she adds, “with learning about semantics and knowledge organization, object-oriented programming, and analytics.”

Having graduated from Michigan and moved to Washington, D.C., just last year, Miss Andries is still very much a newcomer to the Library of Congress. It is “a place that stirs the imagination,” she says. “It’s the largest library in the world, and you’re guaranteed to find something with regard to any topic you can imagine. It’s a privilege to help with the work of making the Library’s wealth of unique resources accessible to researchers and to the public.”