Internship at the King Library – Week 10

We’ve arrived at the final week of the summer semester and of my interesting. That certainly did go fast. I greatly value the experience and knowledge I gained this summer, and I hope to keep in touch with Diana and the other great librarians I met.  Sometimes I wish I could have come to the library more than one day a week during the term, but besides earning school credit, I do have to make a living.

I recorded the narration for Ann Agee’s Academic Search Premier tutorial today.  I enjoyed it and accomplished the task without a problem. It is the type of thing that comes naturally to me. I would volunteer to do more of these narrations if I was asked.

I also completed Diana’s LIBGuide today, incorporating the suggested changes she had e-mailed to me, adding some images to make the site more pleasing to look at, and some more RSS feeds ranging from news from MarketWatch.com to Twitter updates from the SJSU Graduate School of Business.

Diana said the site was ready to launch after I made her changes, so I changed its status to “Published” and the LIBGuide can be seen here:
http://libguides.sjsu.edu/business

If Diana has more suggestions for the LIBGuide this week, I can edit the site from home.  I also have to complete my final internship report this week, as well as my final paper for my Digital Divide class. It’s going to be quite a week! I’d better sign off now, and get well-rested.

Internship at the King Library – Week 9

On Monday, July 27, I spent the better part of a day working on Diana’s business librarian’s LIBGuide.  It isn’t published yet, or I would put a link to it here.  Maybe I’ll be able to come back and do that next week.

In addition to the “Articles and Databases” page I added last week, I added a page for business Web sites (taking most of this from Diana’s existing subject Web page on the King Library site),  a page titled “Research Tools & Tips” that links to information about such hot topics as plagiarism, scholarly vs. popular articles, etc., and also included links to such practical research and writing tools such as RefWorks.  I was also able to embed the library catalog’s search box onto a page, and was delighted to find out I could also add an RSS feed listing the newest business titles the library had ordered (really, I think that might just be the coolest thing ever).

I also found a great page on Frank Vuotto’s  (the CalPoly business librarians) Web site called “Business Research 101,” which described the attributes of various business reference sources, ranging from trade journals to specialized encyclopedias to white papers to popular magazines. I took the content from the CalPoly site, altered it some for the King Library’s purposes, and added a lot of links to the reference example sources mentioned (the original page didn’t have any links).

Something I kept from the CalPoly LIBGuide template I was using was a box on the homepage highlighting a “featured resource.” Of course, I featured the GMID tutorial I had made! Ideally, this featured resource would change on a regular basis, like once a month or so, but since my internship will end next week I guess I probably won’t be the one keeping it up-to-date. Oh well, sadder things have happened.

I know Diana only has intermittent access to the Internet while she visits her parents in Taiwan but I am hoping she will be able to look at the draft of this LIBGuide before I go to the library one last time this Monday, August 3.  I’d like to know if she has any specific suggestions for me as far as additions and changes. I’m sure she’d have valuable feedback for me if she gets the chance!

At the very least, I’d like to beautify some of the pages a little bit more, as I fear the ones that have a lot of text may look a little boring.

In the meantime, Ann Agee e-mailed me today asking me if I’d be interested in narrating a Capitivate tutorial someone else is creating on saving results in the Academic Search Premier database.  I thoroughly enjoyed narrating the GMID tutorial, and having a background in acting and an interest in voiceover, so I’m excited to be doing this.  I’m going to meet with Ann at 10 am Monday to get it done.

I’m feeling pretty good about things right now. Earlier in the semester I felt like I was learning a lot from Diana and other librarians but I feared I wasn’t producing a lot that was tangible for them to use. No more! I feel useful now, and it’s a rather nice feeling.

Internship at the King Library – Week 8

On the morning of Monday, July 20, I staffed the booth for the King Library at the San Jose State University Freshman Orientation from 10:30 am to 12 pm with a library student assistant who is also in the SLIS program. It was great fun! We met on the 4th floor where the academic librarians’ offices are, and took supplies for our booth out to the outdoor spot on campus where the orientation was being held. Our supplies included a posterboard, floor maps of the library, brochures about the library’s special collections, a postcard advertising the current Peanuts/Beethoven exhibit that is on display at the library, a laptop, and a rubber stamp and inkpad.  We would stamp a square for the “King Library” on a sheet the incoming freshmen brought to the booth. This showed that they had visited the booth, talked to us, and learned something about the library.  There was to be a guided tour of the library at 5:10 pm that day, so we gave the students who visited us a small flyer reminding them of that time and telling them where to meet their tour guide. I don’t know how many of the students ended up going on the library tour later in the day, but many seemed genuinely interested in it, so hopefully a fair number of them did.

We talked with the students about their planned major. There were a variety of answers,  from nursing to animation to engineering to Japanese.  We used the laptop at the booth to look up the subject specialists for students’ majors so we could tell them the names of the librarians who were the liaisons for their departments.  This seemed to be a good way to encourage the students to want to learn more about the library, as they seemed excited to learn that the library had  dedicated experts on the available resources in their chosen fields.  I remember one young lady’s eyes lighting up and happily exclaiming that the library actually had a subject specialist for her meteorology major.

Since the King Library is very interesting, it did not seem difficult at all to talk up the  interesting aspects of it to the students.  Some were surprised to learn that it was a hybrid academic/public library, or that you could bring food to some floors of the library, or that there were different noise levels on different floors of the library.

All in all, I had a very good time meeting and talking to the students (and sometimes their parents). It was also perfect weather that morning for being outside on the lawn, and I think that contributed to an all-around cheerful mood that permeated the event. The hour and a half I was there went by fast, and I almost didn’t want to leave.

After my shift at the orientation was over, I met with Diana briefly and then went to lunch.  At 1 pm, Diana and I joined some other librarians at a meeting that was a recap of the American Library Association conference that was held in Chicago earlier this month.  Staff librarians who had attended the conference, including Diana, gave brief updates on certain sessions they had attended. From this, I got a sense of the current hot topics for libraries across the nation.  There were obviously budget concerns and discussion of such issues as merging circulation and reference departments, the possibility of multiple furloughs a month for librarians, and how librarians can attend conferences virtually to save travel expenses.

After the ALA conference recap session, I returned with Diana to her office and we looked at the books I had selected through Diana’s GOBI account. She went over certain criteria she uses to make decisions on which books to purchase. For example, she mostly looks at business books that were published within the past two or three years, and the names of certain publishers give her hints on what type of book it is going to be (the university’s business collection is focused on more scholarly-level literature and generally does not include textbooks or more popular titles, such as business books one might find in the “For Dummies” series). She also looks at whether other CSU libraries have ordered a title, and on reviews from Choice, an ALA magazine that reviews publications for academic librarians.  As a backup to Choice, Diana sometimes looks at the editorial reviews posted for a publication on Amazon.com.

After discussing her duties as the liaison to the business school (among other things, she keeps in contact with the business faculty by producing a newsletter for them once a term and trying to meet with each of them at least once a term), Diana had to leave for the day, as she was preparing for a trip to visit her parents in Taiwan.  She will be in Taiwan for the remainder of my internship.

I spent the rest of my day at the library working on fixing the closed captioning on my Captivate tutorial, and adding a button that linked to the library’s feedback page on the last slide of the tutorial. Ann Agee again was a great help when I ran into mysterious or annoying things that Captivate did.

I returned to the library on Thursday, July 23, a day off from my pays-the-bills job. While Diana is in Taiwan, I will be able to use her office. I e-mailed the complete Captivate tutorial to the person who should be able to upload it to the appropriate place on the library Web site.  I haven’t heard back yet, but am hoping to see my work officially up on the library page soon!

At 10 am, I joined other librarians for a training session on how to create LIBGuides.  The maker of LIBGuides, SpringShare,  describes the program as an “easy to use, web 2.0 content management and library knowledge sharing system. Libraries use it to create attractive multimedia content, share knowledge and information, and promote library resources to the community.”

There is a goal for each SJSU subject specialist librarian to have a LIBGuide ready for use by students and faculty by the time the fall semester starts. The hour-long training covered the basics on such things as how to get started with a LIBGuide, configure the layout, add links, and import the layout and content of an existing LIBGuide if you want to use it as a template (the business librarian at Cal Poly University, Frank Vuotto, graciously gave me his permission to use his business research guide as a launching point for the one I am creating for Diana.

For lunch, I enjoyed a small group of King Library librarians at the Vegetarian House in downtown San Jose.  Diana schedules a lunch outing once a month to give the librarians a chance to connect with one another. I think this is a great idea, as the librarians’ offices and cubicles are spread rather far apart in the building and I get the sense that one could work in the library for a long time without getting to know many of their colleagues if special efforts like this were not made.  It is not an easy time in the state of  California right now, for libraries and many other important insitutions, and a good deal of the lunch conversation revolved around budget concerns and the possibility of furloughs for the librarians.  Still, it was good and cheerful company, and the food was a hit, even among the meateaters of the group (of which I was not one).

After lunch, I spent the rest of my day at the library in Diana’s office, working on the LIBGuide with her computer. After getting started, the most important thing I accomplished was to create a page with links to SJSU’s electronic business databases. This was relatively easy to do, as other SJSU librarians had already created LIBGuide pages with links to every database, and the program made it simple for me to import the links to the business databases from other SJSU LIBGuides. It even imported short descriptions of each of the databases I included, which is an extra way to save a good amount of time!

I can’t believe I only have two weeks left of this internship. It feels like I have learned many things this summer, but it also feels like I just got started. Tomorrow I will go back to the library and hope to make even more significant progress on the LIBGuide.

Internship at the King Library – Week 7

Ann Agee, the resident Captivate expert at the King Library, took a look at my Captivate tutorial and e-mailed me specific instructions on how I can fix the closed captioning and make it comply with CSU accessibility requirements. Diana also mentioned the possibility of adding a short exit survey at the end of the tutorial. I’m hoping to get these things done when I start Week 8 of my internship tomorrow, Monday July 21.

I am also going to help one of the librarians promote the library at the Freshman Orientation fair that is happening tomorrow.  I don’t know exactly what to expect but I have been told we will be talking to incoming freshmen about library resources online and in the building, and let them know who their librarian liaison is for their specific discipline (if they have one chosen!).

Finally, I did some reading of reviews of some consumer behavior-themed books I added to Diana’s GOBI account as potential materials to purchase for the collection.

Internship at the King Library – Week 6

Well, we are really into Week 7 now but since I haven’t added a Week 6 entry yet, here it is! I didn’t get to go into the library at all during Week 6, as due to two vacations and one resignation from co-workers at my “pays the bills” job, I worked there on Monday, which is normally my day to focus on library things. On top of that, I had three assignments due for my Digital Divide class so the internship sort of took a backburner for one week.  But not anymore! I was at the library from 10 am to 6:30 pm today to work on the tutorial for the Global Market Information Database and I learned that I LOVE using Captivate to make online tutorials. There are still some things I need to polish up, and in particular I’m not sure I fully understand the full capacity of the closed captioning function yet.  I’ll need to look at the closed captions on other Captivate tutorials, as if I can enlarge the font and move the captions out of the way of the text on the GMID site to make everything more legible, I definitely want to do that.

Here’s the project so far: http://240project.com/GMIDtutorial.htm.

I was going to go into the library tomorrow, Tuesday, July 14, as well, as I did not make into the library even one day last week, but it turns out the scheduled Information Literacy seminar I was going to attend has been canceled. So instead I have arranged to go to the “pays the bills” job tomorrow, and next week I will take an extra day off on Thursday, July 23 to attend a scheduled training session on LIBGuide.  Another project I’m going to work on is a LIBGuide page for the business librarian.  Hopefully it will be as fun as using Captivate!

Internship at the King Library Week 5

I met with Diana at 10 am on Monday, June 29.  We spent some time going over library science-relevant research grant opportunities I had found online. I am going to put these all together in a Word document, noting specific details and deadlines for some of the grants and providing links to more information for all of them, so that we can post this on the Web.  The document will be organized according to the following hierarchy: SJSU campus opportunities first, CSU system-wide opportunities second, opportunities posted by the American Library Association third.

We discussed participation in the scholarly literature some more, and the writing and research involved.  Diana talked about the tenure process for academic librarians at SJSU at compared it to the processes at other university and college systems. We spent some time discussing the differences between being a librarian at a university and at a community college. Librarians at community colleges are likely to spend more time actively teaching students and not nearly as much time writing, as unlike university librarians they are not required to make contributions to the scholarly literature.  University librarians have 40 hour-work weeks (which makes their schedule much different than other university faculty, who often only go to campus when they have classes to teach).  A normal work week for a community college librarian is 35 hours.

Since I do like writing quite a bit, I feel at this juncture that a university setting would be more suited to me than a community college setting. But who knows – I think I need to keep my options open. Who knows where the jobs will be after I graduate next May?

We also talked about attending conferences, such as those held by ALA, ACRL, CARL, and CLA, as a way to develop and network professionally.  I attended the CLA conference when it was held in San Jose last November but I have not yet attended an ALA conference. Since the 2009 conference is in Chicago next week, it doesn’t look like my first time is going to be this year, but I am now seriously thinking about attending the 2010 conference in Washington D.C.

From 12 – 2 pm, we attended the 2nd and final portion of Dr. Osterling’s brown bag research forum. It focused on ways of phrasing surveys and the best ways to get accurate and truthful data from research participants. Some of the statistical theory she discussed toward the end of the session went a little over my head (I have never taken even one statistics class and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of chi squares!), but for the most part, it was clear and helpful and exposed me to some concepts that I may need to learn more about later.

For the rest of the day, I used one of the two computers equipped with the Captivate software to actually use it myself for the first time. I mostly played with the software to get used to it, but I also created the bare beginnings of the GMID database tutorial I am going to make.  Some frustrating things happened (like the program unexpectedly crashing), but I saved the work I needed. I also spent time working on a script for the tutorial, as I have been told quite plainly it is a very bad idea to start a Captivate project without having a script first! Ann Agee, the resident Captivate expert, was on hand and very helpful in answering my questions about things about the program that seemed non-intuitive or just plain weird.

Later in the week at home, I worked on the grant opportunities resources Word document.  I felt this was a valuable research project for me because I learned about potential ways that libraries and librarians can apply for financial support for various projects. Eventually I may be in a position to want and apply for one of this grants, so it’s good I’m getting an education about them now.  The document I put together includes names, deadlines, award amounts, and basic details of grants I found posted by such organizations at San Jose State, ALA, and the California Association of Research and College Libraries.

I also completed a draft of the script I am going to use for the Captivate tutorial. Ann Agee and others have told me it is madness to start a Captivate project without having your script first.  Reading the script aloud to myself took about one minute and 15 seconds. I imagine that with the audio narrarion with the Captivate visuals my tutorial will easily be about 3 minutes long, which is about the length I am aiming for it to be.

I will not be going on site to the library in the coming week because due to co-workers going on vacation and one quitting, I need to come in on Monday (when I normally don’t work to concentrate on school things) to my job that pays the bill. The following week the vacations will be over and I will compensate for missing my day at the library this week by coming in on both Monday July 13 and Tuesday July 14.  In the meantime, I will be in contact with Diana over e-mail and work on library projects from home.

Internship at the King Library – Week 4

On Monday, June 22, my day at the library started with observing Linda, a public librarian with a special emphasis on business subjects, at the reference desk. She shared with me the two latest issues of the Silicon Valley Business Journal and the annual Book of Lists that it publishes, which lists local companies and ranks them by revenue earned. Linda also showed me where the ready reference business section of the library was and showed me some of the “classic” business reference sources, such as the Risk Management Association’s (RMA) annual statement studies. She also showed me the print version of Rich’s Directory of Northern California businesses (an online version covering all of California also exists), and frequently mentioned ReferenceUSA, an online database that is a directory of detailed information about millions of American and Canadian businesses.

As for the reference questions that occured during this time, the first one I observed was a simple question about where the telephone directories were. From this, I found out that they were not too far from the business ready reference section, so I was happy to learn this fact along with the patron.

Then, a woman came to Linda’s desk and said that she wanted to find out how the economies in South Africa and Madagascar (she was actually unsure of the pronunciation of the latter’s name) were doing. Linda showed the woman a page on the King Library’s Web site that linked to other Web sites that contained information on the world’s nations, including Background notes and the CIA World Factbook.

A man was asking another reference librarian at a nearby desk seemed to be asking similar questions about the two African countries, prompting yet another librarian to wonder out loud if the two patrons were working on a class assignment. It turned out the man and the woman were friends, and it appeared that the man had actually asked the woman to ask for help inasking his question, as he was unable to speak. I don’t know the reason for this seeming disability, but he came to Linda’s desk to join his friend and tried to communicate quite a bit by moving his mouth and making gestures. At one point he was asked to write some words down on a pad: “GOOGLE. South Africa. RVs.” Linda looked up some Web resources regarding RV travel in South Africa. Out of a brown bag, he pulled out a map of the world and pointed to both South Africa and Madagascar on it.

Linda looked up some travel books on Madagascar in the library OPAC and directed him to find them on the third floor. She tried to communicate to him that travel to Madagascar was dangerous right now due to political turmoil in the country, but was unsure if she got the point across. Apparently, he is a regular patron at the library, and she’d had interactions with him before, but she was still not sure if he was unable to hear. He was not looking at her when she said that Madagascar was dangerous, and she was also not sure how much English the man understood. He seemed to be happy with the transaction, though, as he gave the thumbs up signal before leaving.

The woman who intially asked the question for him had an inquiry of her own about spam and phishing scams she saw in her e-mail, such as promises of sharing wealth from Nigerian princes and offers of “mystery shopping” jobs. Linda followed went to another page on the library Web site that linked to Web sites regarding e-mail spam operations. I enjoyed learning about the existence of www.spamhaus.org, which publishes the ROSKO list (the Register of Known Spam Operators), and states this: “80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases, addresses, redirects, locations of servers, domains and dns setups, to a hard-core group of around 100 known spam operations, almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database.” Appears to be a most useful resource indeed!

After spending two hours at the reference desk with Linda, I joined Diana, Linda, and others for a brown bag research forum. The forum was conducted by Dr. Osterling, an SJSU faculty member in the School of Social Work. She gave an overview of quantitative and qualitative research methods and the advantages and disadvantages of a variety of ways to conduct research.

Research Methods is a required class in the SLIS program and I am registered to take it this semester. Linda told me this research forum was like a whirlwind preview of the Research Methods class.

After the research forum, Diana and I discussed scholarly work for a while and then discussed upcoming tasks regarding creating a LibGuide page, working on the collection development policy, and a weeding project.

The last thing I did on Monday before leaving the library was to sit down with Ann Agee, a librarian on the staff who is very knowledgeable about Captivate. I will be using this software to design a tutorial for the Global Market Information Database (GMID). I’m looking forward to starting this creative process, but I’m also a little frightened. I have heard about some frustrating experiences with Captivate. Guess I just have to cross my fingers.

At home, I logged into GOBI since I have the correct password now, and explored it a little. Although I did attend a GOBI training session at the library, it was good to have the kinetic experience of actually using the system myself. I have begun searching for books about consumer behavior to potentially add to the library’s business collection.

On Thursday, June 25, I logged on to questionpoint.org from 5:30 to 6:30 pm from home to try my hand for the first time at answering virtual reference questions. Unfortunately, there were no patrons asking questions during this hour, but I did utilized the time I was logged on to look over the chat transcripts of questions that were asked earlier in the day. Reviewing the transcripts really does give me a better idea of the questions that the librarians at the King Library get asked and helps familiarize me with some of the library’s various policies and procedures.

Internship at the King Library – Week 3

On Thursday, June 11, I was able to leave my “regular job” for a few hours join librarians at the King Library for training on GOBI, a Web-based application the King Library uses for Web management.

On Monday, June 15, I came to the library again and Diana and I went over a project I will be doing using GOBI: finding possible titles for the business collection searching with special “fund” codes to find materials in the categories of marketing and decision science.  Diana told me of other potential sources for finding materials, including Melvyl (the catalog of University of California libraries), Amazon.com, and recommended titles in the Wall Street Journal. We also went over what kind of criteria is sometimes used is selecting materials for the collection: e.g., if the library has multiple copies, if any of them have been checked out, indicating the titles are in demand, etc.

After lunch, I observed another librarian, Shannon, for a half hour of her time on Qwidget virtual reference duty. As in the previous case, there were no questions, but she did give me some helpful insight on her past experiences. Afterwards, Shannon showed Diana and me a Digital Learning Objective survey she had built to gage what students gain from information literacy classes. Diana explained this kind of data is useful for showing people such faculty and accreditors the value librarians’ presence has on campus.

At home this week, I logged on to questionpoint.org to familiarize myself with the questions people are asking in virtual reference. I tried to login to GOBI but I did not have the correct password, so my work with that program will now occur in the following week. Since there was a delay with that, I spent my extra time at home studying Captivate and the GMID (Global Market Information Database), as I will be creating a 3 – 5 minute tutorial introducing it to users.

Internship at the King Library – Week 2

On Monday, June 8, I met with Diana at 10:30 am and we discussed an aspect of academic librarianship that we hadn’t before. In addition to the four areas of reference, information literacy, collection development, and liaison work, Diana discussed with me the duties of an academic librarian at SJSU to contribute to scholarly literature and maintain active involvement in the professional community. For example, Diana’s own professional involvement has included serving as President of the Chinese American Library Association, one of the five ethnic affiliates of the ALA.  For another example, as a trustee of the Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI), a research institute at the SJSU College of Business, Diana was reading grant proposals and research associate applications to prepare for a meeting at MTI the next day.

At 11 am, Diana accompanied me and some newly hired staff librarians on a tour of the library’s special collections on the fifth floor of the library. Danelle Moon, the director of special collections, led the tour, which was fascinating. I enjoyed going “behind the scenes” and seeing the staff offices and storage areas behind the SJSU special collection reading room.  It struck me that temperatures were kept very cold in some of the rooms with rare, delicate material. I also noted with interest that SJSU maintains a collection of pop-up books.

We also went to the library’s Center for Beethoven Studies, where we were afforded a view of the famous lock of Beethoven’s hair, and the Center for Steinbeck Studies, where we were given a look at the manuscript for the Long Valley and treated to anecdotes from Steinbeck’s life, such as the time Hemingway broke a cane Steinbeck had given to another novelist over his own head (Steinbeck had not been pleased!). John Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors, so I really enjoyed this section of the tour and wished I could stay all day.

After a lunch break, I met again with Diana and we discussed virtual reference. For about half and hour, I observed a librarian staff the virtual chat service that the library’s personnel help to run. Unfortunately, I did not observe a question come in to her during this time frame.  Demand for reference services slows down considerably during the summer time when the academic year is not in full swing. However, I did get to look at some interesting transcripts from earlier sessions where librarians answered (or attempted to answer) patron questions, and was shown some resources that will be useful to understanding best practices in delivering virtual reference.

The day at the library ended with a training session in Room 213, a modern, technology-equipped classroom in the library. The session focused on how to use SMART Boards, which are computerized, interactive whiteboards, and quite a few of the SJSU librarians attended.

On Thursday, June 11, I was able to leave my full-time job for a few hours to attend a training session on GOBI, Web-based software used for collection development services. It was good to get exposure to this software, which seems to be heavily used by SJSU librarians. I was given a login so I could explore the GOBI software at home as well.

At home this week, I also was given a login to the librarian side of questionpoint.org so was able to familiarize myself more with patron questions and librarian responses in virtual reference. Diana said I can start answering some questions when I get comfortable. I remember seeng a list of commonly asked questions of King Library personnel when I was observing the virtual reference desk last Monday, and one thing I want to do is get a copy of this list and familiarize myself with it before I try my hand at answering questions – but I should be ready soon!

I did various readings at home this week on the subject of virtual reference, including reviewing the RUSA (Reference and User Services Association) guidelines for virtual reference, and various publications Diana cited, including  a 2005 article from Library Journal: “Virtual Reference: Alive & Well” by Bailey-Hainier, and a 2005 talk by Linda Berube: “Can I Help? Virtual reference service in the UK.” Both publications encouraged the continued practice of virtual reference services against arguments that such services are underused and overcostly. Bailey-Hainer suggests that chat services can be provided in a cost-effective manner if a group of libraries, such as across one state, cooperate with each other to deliver the services, and that it is a way to reach out to people who don’t normally use library services. Both authors emphasize the important part virtual reference may play in providing library services to today’s youth, who are very wired, and, as Berube quotes from the OCLC  Environmental Scan:

“Today’s digital kids think of information oxygen: they expect it. It’s what they breatheICT To meet, play, date and learn. It’s an  in how they acknowledge each other and form more, ICT to some degree has been supply
their first web search and surf years ago.”

Other activites we have planned include observing the public library’s business library at the physical reference desk (on June 22) and helping library staff out at an SJSU Freshman orientation (July 20).

Internship at the King Library – Week 1

My name is Sarah Kishler,  and I am working toward obtaining a master’s degree from the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. The purpose of this weekly blog is to record my activities as an intern as the Martin Luther King Library in San Jose, California, during the 2009 summer session.

The Martin Luther King Library’s current eight-story building in downtown San Jose was opened in 2003.  It is a hybrid library building, housing both the academic library for San Jose State University and the public library serving the City of San Jose. The library contains approximately one and half million volumes and a variety of special collections, such as in the Beethoven Center, the California history room, and the Center for Steinbeck Studies. I am excited to do work at this unique,  cutting-edge library.

I will be learning mainly about academic librarianship during my internship this summer. My site supervisor is reference and instruction librarian Diana Wu, SJSU’s business subject specialist.

On Monday, June 1, I met with her in her office to discuss my learning outcomes in the four areas of reference, information literacy, collection development, and liaison work, and schedule activities that will help me attain them.  Since I work full-time Tuesdays through Fridays, we have agreed that Monday is the day I will be doing most of my on-site work at the library, and will be doing the rest of my internship work from home. On occasion, I may be able to leave my job temporarily to attend certain activities at the library. For example, on Thursday June 11th I will be coming to the library to attend a training session for GOBI (Global Online Bibliographic Information), software that the library will be using for collection development activities. Hopefully, at some point during the semester, I will be able to accompany Diana when she conducts a library instruction session for one of SJSU’s business classes. However, these sessions are scheduled far less frequently in the summer so it might be a challenge.

When I am able to come to the library on Mondays, I hope to get experience observing and helping at the reference desk.

After our discussion and watching two of the library’s IT employees solve a problem with images not showing up on Diana’s Web site, Diana introduced me to other library staff.

Later in the afternoon, I observed Diana prepare for a library instruction session she was teaching for a business class the following day, Tuesday, June 2nd (unfortunately, I was not able to get off of work that day to attend the session with her).

My take-home projects this week included updating a spreadsheet that listed hyperlinks to the access points on the library’s Web page for business databases available to San Jose State University students (a few of them are also available to San Jose Public library users, and Diana asked me to identify these) . The spreadsheet also indicates certain features each database has (e.g, whether the database contains U.S. and/or international company profiles, whether the user can search for current user items, and whether the user can search the database by SIC or NAICS code). I added a column to the spreadsheet to indicate whether the database allows the user to search for public companies by ticker symbol. I also spent some time familiarizing myself with the content and interfaces of the business databases included on the spreadsheet and studied the SJSU course catalog to familiarize myself with the courses offered by the Business School.

I will next meet with Diana on Monday, June 8, and will accompany her and two new librarians on a tour of the SJSU Special Collections.