I had the great privilege this year to serve a position in Gould where I was permitted to slow down, look around, and ask: what is this place, really, and who is it for? That question, in many ways, became a thread throughout my entire internship, and it came into focus during this spring term during my work with Eileen in library operations.
The spring was organized around two projects that, on the surface, seemed distinct. The first was the Pause & Play initiative—a dedicated space within Gould Library for students to rest, play games, work puzzles, and simply be, without academic obligation bearing down on them. The second was drafting an Accessibility Plan for the library. When I first began reading articles and studies about the place of play in academic libraries, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Play in a library? Over the years, I had absorbed, as most students have, a certain notion about what libraries are for—productivity and inquiry. My research complicated this notion quite quickly. Megan Nance’s article on academic libraries prioritizing student mental health through play was a great initial inroad. Rest is not the opposite of learning, but a necessary part of the cycle. The Pause & Play station became, in my mind, an extension of the library’s and Carleton’s mission: to support the whole person who comes through the door.
The accessibility plan deepened that conviction considerably. Drafting the plan was one of the most substantial and challenging pieces of work I undertook this year. It asked me to move between research and practical writing in a way I hadn’t quite done before: reading about WCAG compliance standards and the ADA’s legal architecture, then translating that into actionable language for a real institution. I met with my OAR peer, whose perspective grounded the plan in lived experience. What I found, consistently across the literature and in that conversation, was that accessibility is too often treated as an afterthought, a retrofit, or an accommodation made only when someone asks. One of the things I most wanted the plan to resist was that tendency. The goal I tried to hold throughout the drafting process was to frame accessibility as an institutional responsibility, something embedded from the start.
Writing the plan helped me to learn things I hadn’t expected to. I learned about many things, for example, the difference between an image-only PDF and a true-text document, and the invisible barrier the former creates for a student using a screen reader. I found myself thinking about furniture heights, about wayfinding signage, about whether a quiet study room with dimmable lights is a luxury or simply good design. Universal design, I came to understand, is less about accommodating disability and more about removing the assumption that there is one standard way to be a person moving through a space. In that sense, Pause & Play and the Accessibility Plan were not so different after all. Both were asking Gould Library to expand its imagination of who it serves and how.
Looking back at the year more broadly, I’ve found that this internship prioritized learning over productivity, and that the different terms built upon each other. The work of each term didn’t exist in isolation. The skills I developed earlier—research, careful reading, learning to ask to the many caring library and staff around me—carried directly into the drafting work of this spring. The reflective practice built into each week, the check-ins with Eileen (and Adam and Kate before her), being given the time to stop to ask what did I actually learn this week—these created a kind of metacognitive layer that I think made me a more intentional worker and, I hope, a better thinker.
The career development arc of the term also was extremely valuable. I had assumed the informational interviews and portfolio development would feel procedural. Instead, conversations with staff across the library—in Special Collections, in Archives, and Access Services, for example—gave me a much richer map of what library work actually looks like. It is not one career but many. It can look like a reference librarian who is also a teacher, or an archivist who is also a conservator and a curator of Carleton’s memory, or a digital librarian navigating digital infrastructure. Those conversations made the abstract idea of a career in libraries feel legible and enriching.
If I could change anything, I would want more overlap with other student workers in the library, the hourly employees who are often invisible in both the literature and the formal structures of library learning. There is a whole ecology of student labor sustaining these spaces that rarely gets named or integrated into conversations about what libraries do and who makes them run.
But that is a small wish against a backdrop of real gratitude. I came into this internship not knowing what I didn’t know. I leave it with a deeper respect for the work of building accessible and welcoming spaces, and the memory of a year spent learning that a library, at its best, is not just a place that holds books. It is a place that holds people, all kinds of people, in all the complexity of what they need. That is worth building well, and I am glad to have spent a year trying to understand how.