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.
