NCC News: News

Specialist Spotlight: Cameron Penwell

Through our Specialist Spotlight series we periodically shine a spotlight on the librarians and information specialists of NCC who are often behind the scenes working to support students, faculty, and staff. Whether you’re in the classroom to learn or teach or are conducting research near or far, these hardworking individuals make Japanese Studies possible.

This month we showcase Cameron Penwell, a Japanese reference specialist in the Asian Division at the Library of Congress.

After graduating from Middlebury College with a BA in History and Japanese Studies in 2004, Penwell moved to Tokyo, where he worked for three years as a translator. Returning to the United States, he completed an MA in Japanese history and embarked on doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, achieving ABD status before his career shift. During his graduate studies, his research on the development of Buddhist social work in modern Japan took him to the University of Tokyo as a Fulbright fellow in 2011-12. Prior to becoming a librarian, he taught East Asian history at Knox College in 2016-2017.

Since joining the Asian Division at the Library of Congress in 2017, Penwell has provided reference services in Japanese Studies for researchers in the Asian Reading Room, where users can access the largest Japanese library collection outside of Japan. He has endeavored to make these collections more widely known and more easily discoverable through the publication of research guides, such as those introducing the Japanese collection or publications from the South Manchuria Railway Company, as well as through contributions to 4 Corners of the World, the official blog for International Collections at the Library of Congress, and the International Collections official Facebook page.

In recent years, Penwell has twice served as a mentor to summer interns through the Library’s Junior Fellows Program. These internships allow undergraduate or graduate students to experience a rich variety of library work while also contributing tangibly to improving access to the collections. In both cases, interns worked with the Japanese collection’s extensive holdings of historical periodicals to conduct important inventory work and lay the groundwork for a research guide for these publications.

Penwell has also been active in helping to launch new digital collections at the Library of Congress. In addition to collaborating with Asian Division colleagues to launch the Japanese Rare Book Digital Collection and the Ainu and Ezochi Rare Collection, he has also taken an interest in new strategies for making unique collection materials more widely available online through the digitization of microfilm. Working closely with other colleagues, this resulted in making all the items from the microfilm series Nan'yōchō kankei bunsho 南洋庁関係文書 (Part 1 and Part 2) freely accessible on the Library of Congress website.

As part of NCC, Penwell has been active on the Cooperative Collection Development Working Group since 2018, which has given him the opportunity to assist with the group’s goal of strategically coordinating acquisitions among institutions in North America to maximize access. In the coming year he will be helping to update the group’s guide for Japanese newspaper holdings in North America.