Internships
Pleasant Suprises
Posted November 7, 2016 by Amanda Pizzollo
Whew! Busy week with a couple penultimate assignments and a presentation in my classes, plus attempts to get back in shape and return to meditating daily. It seems as though my new year resolution phase has kicked in a bit early. Or maybe I’m just excited for cookie season. So, I thought this week I might share a bit some of my pleasant surprises from my role as a metadata intern. When I started library school, I honestly didn’t really have an intention of becoming an information organizer to the extent of a metadata creator or cataloger. I found I really like my 415 class though (information organization), and suddenly I was considering resource description as a potential career. A piece of me thought I was just getting excited about something new to me, not really finding a new career path. So, I looked in other directions course and internship-wise for a while. Yet, the allure of info org has been too strong my friends — and it has remained a consistent presence for me…
Interning at Johnson and Wale’s Culinary Arts Museum
Posted February 2, 2016 by Jill Silverberg
Like many students who entered SLIS in the fall of 2013, this semester I will be completing my final LIS course. While each program within SLIS is structured differently, all feature a Capstone course that usually includes an internship requirement. For this internship, students can either wait to choose a location from a database of options (similar system to what is used in LIS 438, the introductory course for those on the Archives track) or they can work alongside the Capstone Coordinator, Kendra Giannini, and set up an internship at a location of their own choosing. Since my first semester as an Archives-History dual degree student, I have known that my dream job would be to work within a museum or special library that features a large collection of cookbooks and other texts and items associated with food culture. When I met with Kendra, we talked about my interest in Food Studies and she suggested that I consider trying to satisfy my Capstone requirement by interning at the Johnson and Wales Culinary Arts Museum. With…
Flash to 502
Posted January 19, 2016 by Alexandra Bernson
Last Saturday I showed up to the Concord Free Public Library ten minutes late, pumped full of adrenaline, wet from the rain, and clutching a Dunkin Donuts coffee and old-fashioned donut. It wasn’t necessarily how I wanted to start my very first day at my 502 internship! The night before, after playing board games with friends, I set four different alarms for the next morning. I was prepared to wake up around 7AM, get ready, make breakfast, and hop on the Fitchburg Line for a 9:18AM arrival in Concord, Massachusetts. When Simmons had originally ranked potential internships, I had chosen those with weekend or late night hours within the Boston city limits. When I found out I’d have to hike all the way to Concord, I was initially disappointed. But the prospect of the collection excited me – I’d be working with the records of the Concord Minute Men re-enactors, one of the first and most respected re-enactment groups in the United States. I had worked at Renaissance festivals and been to battle re-enactments before…
Website Launch and Other Odds and Ends
Posted April 18, 2015 by Samantha Quiñon
Last week at my cataloging internship at the American Archive for Public Broadcasting (AAPB) at WGBH Boston, our website launched and went live. This has been a long time coming and many, many people worked very hard to make this happen, so I wanted to take a minute and share it with you. Understandably, we had a party at lunch. I basically only ate cake and powered through the afternoon on a sugar high from the excellent buttercream frosting. Here’s a link to the AAPB, so you can see the results and learn more about the project I’m working on: http://americanarchive.org/. This week was busy, but I managed to break my routine a few times. First on Tuesday, I went to happy hour at a near by bar called the Squealing Pig. The event was sponsored by the SLIS Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists (SCoSSA), and there was all sorts of good food and good company. It was a nice mid-week break. Later in the week, I had an interview for an…
Love in (or Lovin’) the Archives
Posted March 9, 2015 by Alexandra Bernson
I’ve been thinking about the phrase “I have a lot on my plate” lately. It seems like if my schedule were this figurative plate, it would look like I just left an all-you-can-eat buffet. In the last week I have ended a job, started a new job, worked a shift of my internship, and set up an interview for a possible second part-time job at an academic library… All while trying to keep up with my school work. In addition to all of this, I’m trying to make time for my friends, family, and (lastly) sleep. Sometimes when one’s schedule is so packed, it’s hard to remember what exactly one is working toward. But thankfully I’ve been utterly caught up in the romance that can happen with archival work. Previously, I mentioned the series of love letters between a young couple in the 1940s that is a large part of the collection in which I’m working, but recently I found several other letters written to the young woman of the aforementioned couple from a completely…
Thoughts of Summer
Posted March 1, 2015 by Samantha Quiñon
This week I registered for summer classes and applied for a summer internship. I could hardly believe it. Summer seems so far off, especially given the amount of snow on the ground now, but it’s better to plan for it now than to be caught unprepared later. As for classes, after much vacillation, I decided to take courses in XML, digital stewardship, and digital humanities. It is all very technology oriented. A year ago if you had told me I would focus on something like this for a career, I would have told you that you were out of your mind. It is really challenging, but I’m passionate about making information available and discoverable for everyone. That’s why concentrating on digital repositories seems like a good choice for me. The choice also fits very well the professional and internship experience I have. It’s tough, because I feel like my level of skill with technology isn’t as advanced as a lot of other students’, but I think I can overcome my deficiencies and learn more given…
Ancestors & Acquisitions – My Genealogical Internship
Posted February 23, 2015 by Alexandra Bernson
There is such a difference between learning the theory behind everything we study here and actually putting those theories to good use. As I am currently enrolled in LIS438 (Introduction to Archives), I have the fortune of spending a few hours each week at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, Massachusetts. Before I go into my work there, I want to encourage all of you to visit the NEHGS. While my work there will definitely keep me busy, I plan on returning to this organization and looking into my own family tree. While parts of my family are very new to the United States, there is so much to discover and explore. The librarians, genealogists, and researchers that work at the institution from Tuesday to Saturday each week are incredibly kind, knowledgeable, and helpful. The society’s collections include published genealogies, manuscripts, maps, art… and not just from New England. One floor is dedicated to European materials, while their general reference and microfilm collections include materials from New York, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest. …
Takin’ Care of Business
Posted December 20, 2014 by Samantha Quiñon
Good news! I have a cataloging internship for the spring (January-May 2015). It’s at WGBH (a Boston TV and radio station that produces two thirds of the country’s public broadcasting, like Masterpiece Theater, Antiques Road Show, and Frontline) at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB). Besides cataloguing, I’m going to contribute to their blog and sit on an advisory sub-committee for PBCore (Public Broadcasting Core), the metadata schema the archive is using and developing for audiovisual material. I’m really excited. It’s been tough for me to find a cataloguing internship in the Boston area. The internship isn’t paid, so I need another way to make money. Fortunately, I was able to schedule two of my classes on the same day and one over Spring Break, so I have a flexible schedule to accommodate work. I’ve been applying for a lot of jobs, and I have interviews for three. Two are at local education institutions, one is at a museum, and they all are at libraries. Most of the employers that want to interview me…
Real World – The Library
Posted October 5, 2014 by Alison Mitchell
When I decided to apply to SLIS, I wanted to make sure that I actually liked working in a library. I was about to turn my family’s life upside down, leaving fairly calm and flexible freelance work that allowed me to always pick the kids up at school, for classes, assignments and, ultimately, set hours working in a library. What if I hated it? I applied for several positions and, since July, I’ve been working as a clerk in the Children’s Department at the Goodnow Library in Sudbury, MA. I absolutely, completely love it, and am thrilled to be in school putting this career change into motion. After only a few weeks of classes, I’m making so many connections between what we learn in school and what I do in the library. Pulling books for Interlibrary Loan? It’s all based on what we’re learning in 415! Answering questions from very different types of patrons? We talked about that in 401! The librarians at Goodnow are great resources, too, full of advice about course selection and…
Schedule Update
Posted October 4, 2014 by Samantha Quiñon
My schedule changed this week and became much more busy thanks to two new jobs of sorts. The first is an internship at Emerson College, and the second is a volunteer position at Boston Arts Academy/Fenway High School. The internship is required for my Archival Methods and Services (LIS 438) class. For eight hours a week (on Monday in my case) through the first or second week of December, students in this class must attend an internship at a local repository where they learn about the basics of archives. The internship lets me and my classmates see what archivists do on a daily basis by allowing us to both observe and complete nitty-gritty, time-consuming (and highly edifying) tasks that are perfect for students. Doing these jobs will provide us with skills to complete a final project at the internship, which will comprise a significant portion of our grade. My internship, in Emerson’s digital archives at the Iwasaki Library, has me processing a small digital collection of alumni weekend photographs and creating a finding aid for…