[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.

Beginner Status

Greetings from New York,

This is my first official post as a new contributing writer for Hack Library School and I’m psyched to share a bit of my experience from the past week (08/20/11 to 08/27/11) both as a new library school student at Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and as a transplant to New York City.

Hack Your Library School Application – Pratt SILS

John Tomlinson

John Tomlinson is an MLIS candidate at the Pratt Institute in New York City (degree expected in December 2011), and communications manager at Synergos, a nonprofit organization that fights poverty around the world. He’s also website manager for SLA@Pratt, a student chapter of the Special Libraries Association. He’s realized that library school exacerbates many of his neuroses, and is now trying to really own those neuroses rather than fight them. JT has mainly lived in the Northeastern US, and also spent a couple of years working in China. He has a BA in East Asian Studies from Harvard College and an MA in International Relations from Yale University.

It may sound silly, but the main reason I went back to school was for intellectual stimulation – I’ve worked at the same place (a small, global nonprofit organization) for more than 15 years and was a little bored. I also was interested in learning more about knowledge management, which would be useful in my job. And I’ve always loved books and classification schemes.

So I toyed with the idea of going back to school for a few years, and when the economy turned bad I decided I’d apply in case I got laid off and needed something to do for a few years. As it happened, I wasn’t laid off, and went to school part-time when I got in.

I only applied to one library program – for an MLIS at Pratt’s School of Information and Library Science – because I wanted to go to school in Manhattan, where I live and work.

Hack Your Program – Pratt

Many readers have expressed interest in hearing more about the SILS program at Pratt and so we’re happy to say that we have two really great posts this week!

Lauren Bradley

Lauren Bradley recently graduated from the Pratt Institute School of Information & Library Science in New York City. She is a technical services and cataloging librarian with two organizations at the Center for Jewish History. She enjoys costume librarianship, database searching, and government documents. Follow her on Twitter @BibliosaurusRex

All views expressed here are my own and any criticism is meant to be taken constructively.

Pratt

Program Overview 

Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science is unique in that is one of two non-art related programs at a primarily art and design school (the other is the Construction Management program, a part of the Architecture School).  Although the main campus is in Brooklyn, the library school occupies the sixth floor of a pretty awesome building on 14th St. in Manhattan.  Pratt does not have an online component.  All classes are taught in Manhattan, except for few classes that are taught off-site at libraries around New York City.  Off-site locations include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Public Library, and New York Public Library.