Kent State University requires the completion of an internship for all of their MLIS candidates. When it came time for me to begin my internship, I met with Otterbein University to determine if they were the environment I was looking for. I was also interested to see if they had a project that fit my desired plans. As it turns out they did, and I accepted the opportunity to do my internship there. What I was looking for was a position digitizing documents to provide access to historical items to a broader online community. Additionally, because most of my work has been in public libraries, gaining experience in an academic library would help me to learn another aspect of librarianship and give me some perspective on possible career paths.
The projects I completed at Otterbein were to correct the transcriptions of the scanned diaries of Lucinda Cornell and to upload them to their Digital Commons. I also took the initiative to seek out scrapbooks to digitize, correct, and upload as well. I was charged with uploading issues of T&C Magazine, a campus magazine, to the Digital Commons and adding the metadata for those as well. A final duty was to evaluate and purchase some materials for the library’s collection, which in my case took the shape of art books to align with a visit from an artist on campus.
As both a requirement of the internship program at Kent State and Otterbein’s own system, I was required to keep a log of my activities. You can find that along with the descriptions of my work by following this link.