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New York Public Library
Ten SI students spent their week of Spring Break working on various projects at the New York Public Library (NYPL). Leilani Dawson (left) worked with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts where she did several different activities, such as updating finding aids, using RLIN for authority work, and attending staff meetings. Leilani enjoyed the combination of hands-on work (specifically with theatre photographs from the period 1880-1940 and original costume designs from the 1960s-1990s) and sitting in on important meetings where she gained an understanding of the financial challenges currently faced by the NYPL due to city budget constraints. Antony Chang (below right) spent his week working in the NYPL main office with the web design team. In addition to using his web skills, Antony was able to gain valuable insight into the organizational culture of the NYPL from his vantage point in the main office. He found the staff he worked with generous with their time and eager to increase his understanding of the New York library system. 
The remaining eight students - Anne Holcomb, Caroline Hughes, Jan Johansson, Laura Barrett, Rachael Hu, Jaime Nelson, Susan Hooyenga and Janet Yoder - had a very unique experience in the NYPL's Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library. Their week turned out to be an enormously educational experience as they were given an orientation and training on the inner workings of the library. As one student put it, "Rather than an internship…it was structured like a high intensity MBA-type onsite case study of access systems with a focus on the conflicting strategic goals of organizational units." A veteran staff member took them under his wing for the week and provided a structured experience that included tours of different NYPL facilities, speakers from throughout the library system (some were SI alumni), descriptions of various projects, hands-on preservation work, observation at reference desks and formalized opportunities to interact with the library staff to discuss career choices and educational requirements. 
Throughout the week, they spent time in the following departments/projects: materials stabilization, the storage and processing annex, the digital images lab, performing arts archiving, Science and Industry library (stacks, computer lab and reference), Technical Services, Humanities Library stacks and reference, Educational Outreach, Art, Local History and Genealogy, Periodicals, Maps, and Scholars Center. A couple students wished they could have done more hands-on work, but all of them agreed that the exceptional attention, time and energy expended by the library staff on their behalf provided an incredible and diverse learning opportunity that complemented their learning at SI. The following quotes from these students speak volumes about how much they valued their time at the NYPL: "I had hoped to be exposed to the underpinnings of a successful, historic institution and was not disappointed." "As an HCI specialist at SI…I was concerned that I wouldn't have the necessary grounding in library or archival practices to contribute in a major way to the NYPL. However, those concerns were swept away after the first day." 
"I was especially struck by one thing that [our NYPL supervisor] mentioned about managing: whenever he has to assign people to a new task, he does it himself for a couple of hours, to find out exactly what it's like. I thought that made more sense than a lot of management techniques I've heard about." "To provide concrete detail to the story of access systems, we were given tours of 111 miles of shelving, including the largest single high-density shelving system in North America. We were spared walking the entire length of shelving, but we might have done a half-marathon by the end of the week." "The hands-on work was in preservation (which was extremely useful as an archives student) and reference. I spent one afternoon in the rare books room, and immediately knew that was what I wanted to do with my career." 
On working with the reference librarians… "[The reference librarian I worked with] looked in the catalog, looked through books along with the patron, used Google ("But I can't use Internet sources," the patron protested. "Ah, but there might be citations that we can use to find print sources," [the librarian] explained), and went searching through the stacks with the help of a cataloguer." "I am currently enrolled in the Preservation of Information class at SI, and my experience at the NYPL was an amazing supplement to what I have learned in the classroom setting." |