Now for the rest of my summer!
Posted September 3, 2025 by Aurora Daniel
First, I continued working at the Simmons University library part time on Mondays and Tuesdays. Since we had a lot of student workers graduate this spring for the first month of the break I was one of the few workers trained on all of our tasks. This meant that I was busy my entire shift sorting mail, processing interlibrary loans, updating book catalog records, and responding to reference chats, emails, and phone calls. Since I like to stay busy this was perfect for me. Once the new student workers were trained on our tasks I transitioned to some of our longer term projects like collections inventory, updating book labels, and spent more time on collections cataloging.
Inventory in the Beatley Library stacks
Additionally, all throughout the summer I was coaching Ultimate Frisbee. The Spring session ended mid-June, so I said goodbye to all of my elementary school players as they don’t have practices during the summer. I brought popsicles for the last day and I was swarmed by players. They gobbled them right up and came back for seconds (and sometimes thirds)! My high school program shifted to weeknights only and wrapped up on August 13th. Since my surgery requires that I be on crutches for up to 10 weeks and then I’m not able to return to all activities until 6 months post-op I made the difficult decision to stop coaching after my summer session. While I have loved being part of the program for the past two years, I didn’t want to come back next spring when I’m not quite sure what my health is going to look like, on top of being in the middle of job applications and cranking out my history thesis.
My players and I from the summer session
My last work experience was interning at the Peabody Essex Museum as their Digital Projects intern at the Phillips Library. This was a digitization internship where I photographed materials for the Salem Tercentenary Collection, created the metadata, uploaded it to both the internal and external storage, and created a collections webpage where anyone can look at the materials. My work process got featured on PEM’s Tiktok page, so if you’d like a behind-the-scenes look you can check that out here:
Me in the Peabody Essex Museum Library’s stacks
During this internship I also got to meet with other library and museum staff to hear about their careers and toured different galleries and collection storage sites. While I’m not sure I necessarily want digitization to be my full time job, it was great to be able to get experience with their photolab and technology as well as their systems and metadata schema.
Summer Interns at the Peabody Essex Museum
Finally, I had surgery on August 19th, so I spent the last couple of weeks of summer break at home resting. While it has been stressful navigating this recovery process, I’m grateful that I could take a break to focus on healing. It may seem odd, considering I’m a bit of a workaholic, but I enjoyed being bed-ridden because I got to slow down. My days were filled with quilting, reading for pleasure, gentle walks, and naps, all of which I desperately need after such a jam-packed summer.
Out on a walk/ride on a rail trail in Franconia Notch, NH
Although I’ll be missing the days of ease, I’m excited to be back in classes and behind the service desk in Beatley Library. I’m starting my final year of the dual degree program so it’s a bit bittersweet to think that this is my last year of school. I won’t get too ahead of myself though. Time to read syllabi and get settled into my work and school flow.