[Guest] Anatomy of an Internship

Project CHART: How eight months in the basement of the Brooklyn Public Library turned me into a Digital Project Manager.

Nora Almeida is a Brooklyn-based poet and MLIS student at Pratt Institute, where she is currently working towards a certificate in Digital Curation. Some of her LIS interests include: new media preservation, scholarly communication, and the open access movement. She works at the National Archives.

During the first semester of my MLIS program at Pratt Institute and after nearly 7 years as a college student, I had begun to think that there were only two kinds of internships: good internships and paid internships. Last winter, when I was given grant funding to complete a digital management certificate program and the opportunity to work for two semesters as an intern on a cross-institutional digital cultural heritage project, I was thankfully proven very wrong. Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research, & Technology) is a three-year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded initiative that aims to simultaneously train future digital managers and generate a shared repository for historic Brooklyn images from the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), Brooklyn Museum, and Brooklyn Historical Society collections.