Carla Bywaters - Law Library of Congress Externship

Written By Shan Bates

While a part-time evening law student at Boyd, Carla Bywaters ('24) interned virtually for the Law Library of Congress. She first learned about the coveted internship positions at the Library of Congress when she attended San Jose State University for her Master of Library and Information Science degree. "It was the most fascinating externship I could have imagined,” and she credits Professor Jeanne Price, the director of the law library, and the Director of the Samuel S. Lionel Externship Program Dawn Nielsen, for ushering in this internship as an externship for credits at Boyd. 

Her first externship during the Fall 2023 semester centered on the Library of Congress' Remote Metadata Program. This initiative's objective is to collect all the Statutes at Large online. "When we started locating each of the 20 fields of metadata that needed to be inserted for inclusion, the information was not all in one place. We had to search three-plus areas to find this level of information." Carla's role was researching the metadata fields with a teammate, and she says she was able to find most of the information with the vast resources available at the Wiener-Rogers Law Library.

Spring 2024's internship with the Library of Congress involved analyzing its Native American Constitutions and Legal Materials and offering areas of improvement. Of the more than 400,000 digital items that the Library holds, the collection comprises 428 items from 230 tribes of the 574 federally recognized tribes. Carla says, "My biggest recommendation was to make it a more engaging and robust collection by downloading more recent legal materials and linking disparate items together."

Carla specifically applied to law schools after her master's program with the goal of becoming a law librarian. During the Spring 2024 commencement ceremony, she was inspired by the theme in the keynote address to have a plan but be open to any possibility. She was accepted to the Library of Congress' Summer Remote Program, Creative Digital Publications for summer 2024, creating AP-Style blogs for In Custodia Legis.