Discuss the strong points of your internship experience.
How did you feel about your training and mentoring/supervision?
What was the most challenging thing about working in Special Collections?
If you could make a change to your internship experience, what would you change?
I will continue to say that the curriculum of the internship was the strongest point of the internship experience. Entering into the intern position, I had absolutely no real background in library procedures, roles, or responsibilities, but the way the year was structured accommodated my inexperience. Each term there was a gradual buildup of knowledge and skills, usually gathered first through assigned readings and then refined in conversations with professional library staff. The amount of responsibility I was accorded was, I think, usually proportioned well to my level of comfort in carrying out certain tasks. And whenever I had questions or doubts, I felt able to ask them without any fear of reprimand or shame. In other words, the internship prioritized learning (equal parts reading and experiential) over productivity.
And, intentional or not, there was much crosspollination between terms. The acquisitions and processing steps from RADS informed much of the way I understood the accessibility portion of information literacy, and that understanding then brought up new questions and insights to those processes earlier learned. Put another way, the termly curricula were mutually constructive with each other. This was facilitated well, I think, by the emphasis placed on constant reflection on both the roles of a (RADS/RI/SC) librarian and the library as a whole.
The training for the internship was smooth sailing. It was evident that there was already a pre-existing template to use when training me, and it proved quite effective! Some readings complimented the hands-on work more than others (thinking about the LibGuide on constructing LibGuides here).
As for the mentoring/supervision, I have only positive thoughts to share. Everyone from RADS to Reference Instruction and Special Collections were warm and receptive to my thinking out loud. I am glad to have been able to connect with all the library staff that I met. I wish my thanks could carry the weight of my gratitude, but the word alone has its limits. Still, thank you all for the opportunity, mentorship, and kindness. I only wish I could return something of equal worth, but alas, I was but an intern!
It took some getting used to being more of a worker than student when I was proctoring(?) research appointments. I sometimes did small double takes when someone addressed a question to me. There was a small grain of disbelief that I could be of help since much of everything in special collections was new to me during my first few weeks. At some point though I had enough confidence to feel like an available resource to others. Handling materials was also challenging – though mostly in a this-is-nerve-inducing way and not necessarily this-task-is-hard way. I’ll say the early session with Abby was super helpful! Over time I also became friends with the materials we pulled and could sense what would be permissible to do with them. The maps for Asuka’s class were a little challenging at first, but I got the hang of that pretty quickly too.
Practically everything about the internship worked well for me, and if there was anything that didn’t, my mind cannot recall it. I will repeat, though, my call for greater involvement with other student workers. Thinking more on that, I realize that there was hardly ever any mention of them in the literature or in the framing of library work. Yet they (we?) exist! I don’t know what that integration could look like, but it would potentially be an outlet for others to learn about the intern position too.
