Lisa A. Raney

I've been in the Genealogy and Local History Department for about a month now. One thing I can say is that it keeps me on my toes: I have a variety of responsibilities which is something that I enjoy. Plus, we have at least three card catalogs in my department.

I have scheduled desk hours and scheduled hours in the Cincinnati Room. When I'm on desk, I'm answering phone and e-mail reference. I use electronic resources (databases and internet) and our extensive collection to answer genealogical and local history questions. And I really do use all of these. I’m finding myself going between our Ancestry Library database, Google, city directories, and running down in the stacks for yearbooks and other materials - often times in a single day.

The Cincinnati Room is where our Rare Books and Special Collection is housed. This role is more structured, as I follow standards and procedures for rare books and fetch items from our rare books when needed. Of course, sometimes patrons just come in to view our exhibits. Right now we have an exhibit on music competitions/choir games to accompany the World Choir Games. Exhibits are rotated quarterly, but the jewels of the room are the Audobon elephant folio and the panorama.


The panorama is a series of 8 daguerreotype photo plates taken of Cincinnati in 1848 by Charles Fontayne and William Porter. It underwent conservation work in 2006, and during the process the images were digitized. One of the things that impresses me most is that these images can be enlarged up to 32x its original size without losing their clarity. We have the original daguerreotype plates on display along with a touchscreen monitor where visitors can enlarge any part of the image. Reference librarians added points of interest to the image, which adds historical context. You can view it here, though some of the plates are much darker on the site.

My off-desk duties include assisting the librarian who is in charge of our library's contributions to the Veteran's History Project. I've been creating video logs of oral history interviews we've collected. I'm also in charge of checking in books to the collection and will soon be working with periodicals and serials.

Genealogy is a very interesting field, but a tough one because it takes a lot of curiousity, thoroughness, thoughtfulness, and persistence. This is important in all reference work, to be sure, but the sources used in genealogical work are not as cut and dry as a lot of other research. A lot of our collection isn't in the open stacks, some isn't in our catalog, and it's all over - literally. Some of the questions are easier than others (for i.e. "Can you scan and send me pages 401-402 from such-and-such book" v. "Can you tell me when my family moved or something else with this little information that I have?") A lot of what I've been doing is trying to rewire my brain to think of all the possible places something could be. There are a lot of inconsistencies due to human error, human flaw, some things indexed, some things not, some things we have and some things that other places have.