Ep10. Library School: Internships & Independent Study
After 2 months away from the microphone, The Not So Little Librarian podcast is back with another episode in the Library School series which covers my subjective experience completing both an online internship and an independent study student assistantship while in SJSU iSchool's MLIS program.
The remote internship I completed for Chicago's Busy Beaver Button Museum [https://www.buttonmuseum.org/about] took place in Summer 2020 at the height of the pandemic lockdown. To be completely honest, my experience was positively influenced by stay-at-home orders; the internship was the only thing that I had planned for the Summer, so both my husband and I were able to shift our schedules so that I was working on the internship typically between midnight to 5 AM. That being said, I discuss the internship objectively, as well - how the course operated, the types of tasks that I was assigned, and how I went about completing work for the museum's website. As mentioned in the episode, I wrote one blog post for the museum - "New York's 'Women in Business' Week with Phyllis Yvonne Reed." [https://www.buttonmuseum.org/content/new-york%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cwomen-business%E2%80%9D-week-phyllis-yvonne-reed] Additionally, there are a couple buttons that I mentioned throughout that section of the episode, but I'd like to highlight a couple (whether mentioned or not) that I think you may find interesting: Women for Racial and Economic Equity [https://www.buttonmuseum.org/buttons/women-racial-and-economic-equality], Rutles Drums [https://www.buttonmuseum.org/buttons/rutles-drums], and Cocoon Movie [https://www.buttonmuseum.org/buttons/cocoon-movie]. Lastly, here is the link to the back-end assignment that I completed for credit through SJSU - Day in the Life | Busy Beaver Button Museum Virtual Internship [https://youtu.be/kVbvgBoNidQ].
The independent study course that I took in grad school was completing a student assistantship that focused on building upon and reviewing the content of a closed website designed by past students for a 1 unit elective course studying incunabula - books printed using moveable metal type on the Gutenberg printing press (1451-1501). While I try to avoid talking too much about the actual content of the course (as that's planned for a future episode!), I talk about how I went about researching the topic and what I took away from the experience. If you're interested in learning about incunables and Gutenberg, I definitely recommend watching Stephen Fry's documentary: The Machine That Made Us [https://youtu.be/uQ88yC35NjI].
If you have any questions about either details of either the internship or independent study, advice on filtering through options, or anything else you may want to reach about to me about, please email me at thenotsolittlelibrarian@gmail.com or find me on Instagram and Twitter at @LitLibraryCast!
