Timeline of IPL Interns’ Contributions to the Growth of the IPL

Below are described the invaluable contributions that interns working for the IPL have made, all of which will hold long-term benefits for the IPL and its patrons. Interns are students currently enrolled in IPL consortium member library and information schools who applied and were selected for an IPL internship. Note that the summer of 2009 is when we started collecting descriptions of what students did for their IPL internships.

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2009

Summer

Hope Thompson, Digital Reference Service Intern (Florida State University): As part of her weekly Reference Administration shift, Hope worked closely with the IPL community to sort the questions of patrons and add extra information that would be helpful to the volunteers. Additionally, she assisted in answering Rescue questions that were either past due or needed further attention.

Lindy Brown, Digital Reference Service Intern (Florida State University): In addition to working a Reference Administration shift once a week, Lindy worked through bounced questions to gather examples of "best answers" to serve as an educational guide for students and volunteers in the IPL. (The examples can be found in the IPL Learning Community wiki’s Answer Board). Additionally, she helped search for and collate applications to add to a collection -- to be added to the IPL in the future -- of web 2.0 technologies.

Tricia Burmeister, Collection Development Intern (University of Pittsburgh): Tricia Burmeister evaluated resources, edited metadata, checked links, and added new resources to the IPL. In addition to working regularly with the serials, newspapers, and general collections, she updated the Presidents of the United States (POTUS) collection, the German Ready Reference page, and the Native American Authors and Literary Criticism collections. She suggested changes to the subject hierarchy for Business, then selected and added new resources to the "Small Business and Entrepreneurship" and "Businesspeople" sections of the collection. In preparation for the integration of the Librarian’s Internet Index (LII) with the IPL, she analyzed LII newspaper subject headings and mapped them onto IPL headings and geographic codes. Tricia especially enjoyed using her HTML skills and writing abstracts for resources in many different subject areas.

Janis McKnight, Collection Development Intern (Florida State University): Janis McKnight, as a graduate student in the distance MLIS Program at Florida State University, had the pleasure of being a Digital Collections & Maintenance Intern under Michael Galloway. She learned many things during this internship about evaluating websites (web, blog, serials, and newspapers) and creating metadata; she even learned about all the translation sites to help evaluate web sites in another language. Once she had that down then, she started doing the fun stuff, checking broken links, working on inactivated records, link checking in QRC (the software used by the IPL to manage its online reference service), evaluating new websites and creating metadata, evaluating and updating existing metadata, combining duplicate records and consolidating their metadata together. For example, she combined 165 About.com records into one record. She added new authors and literature to the Native American and Literary Criticism collections and added 200 museum records to the Auxiliary collection. Finally she added new subject subheadings to the Kidspace and Teenspace collections for Virtual Field Trips and then went through the collection and added that subheading to the appropriate records. Overall it was a great experience, and she learned so much about evaluating web sites and creating and checking metadata. She even learned that mindless tasks (in moderation) can be very relaxing!

Lael Voeller, Digital Reference Service Intern (University of Washington): Lael worked with staff and volunteers to research and provide quality answers to the IPL patrons’ questions. Lael answered patron questions and also provided valuable input for others answering questions. She focused on answering the more difficult reference questions. Additionally, Lael updated the IPL calendar with International Independence Days and other National holidays from around the world, using both CultureGrams and the U.S State Department’s website to locate the international holidays.