Yale University Library
Internship Fall 2018
by Lauren M. Johnson
Southern Connecticut State University
“I work with students and scholars; guiding, collaborating, and teaching about the collection. One of the most enjoyable aspects of working at the Beinecke is the people.”
-George Miles, Curator, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
The Yale Library is one of the great libraries in the world and I want to tell you a bit about what I learned during my time as an intern. Christine Weideman, Director of Manuscripts and Archives, supervised the internship and provided me with the opportunity to visit many of the library’s departments. To see the full Yale University Library Organizational Chart, go here.
Highlights of my internship
Learning about Collection Development
I met with Julie Linden, Director of Collection Development, to discuss the various ways published materials are acquired by the Library. I learned how Julie oversees the collection development budget and meets regularly with librarians throughout the Library who manage individual acquisition funds. I attended a vendor meeting with Springer Nature, one of Yale’s most important providers of electronic resources. Monthly statistical analysis charts are used in these meetings to determine the number and subject content of article downloads to understand how Yale faculty and students are using the resources. I learned how Springer Nature evaluates top referring sites including Google, Google Scholar, Pub Medical, and Yale Library Search so that librarians can understand how resources are found by patrons.
Christine Weideman explained how unpublished materials are acquired by special collections repositories across the Library. Deeds of gifts govern donations of materials by individuals and organizations, and purchase agreements govern purchases of unpublished materials. Special collections repositories at Yale offer an amazing selection of materials for teaching and research.
Learning about services offered to Yale faculty and students
Yale Library offers undergraduate students a Personal Librarian Program. The goal of the program is to help students become familiar with resources in the Library. Every incoming student is assigned a personal librarian to whom they can go for help with identifying resources for their studies. Personal librarians are drawn from staff across the Library; there are almost 50 Personal Librarians participating in the program.
Librarians regularly partner with faculty to hold class sessions in which students learn how to find Library resources pertinent to individual classes. I sat in on a session taught for English 114, Vegetarians, Gourmands, Cannibal, during which the students learned how to find resources for their writing assignments.
Archivists partner with Yale faculty to introduce students to learning from primary sources. I had the opportunity to spend class time with Bill Landis, Head of Public Services in Manuscripts and Archives, and first year students in History 022, “What History Teaches Us”, taught by Professor John Gaddis. Bill chose materials for students to review, and they were given questions to think about as they reviewed the material. They shared their thoughts about the materials they reviewed with their classmates. Bill created a blog for the class and it can be found here.
The Yale Library makes the Library’s resources available through Quicksearch. I learned that this tool was created by the Discovery team in the Technical Services Department. A team of software engineers is working under a grant named LD4P by using bibliographic conversion workflows of MARC and RDA authority field records into Bibframe. Ontological modeling and vocabulary versioning are used for machine learning processes through the mapping of linked data for the future of searching tools.
Learning about careers in academic research libraries
One of the learning outcomes for my internship was to become familiar with the various kinds of librarianship in which staff in the Library specialize. I was particularly interested in what I learned when I visited the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. Medical librarianship offers a variety of information services to both medical professionals and students. Kathleen Frumento, Assistant Director of Clinical Information Services, works directly in the hospital with doctors to provide instant informational services in areas of internal medicine, cardiology, infectious diseases, and nephrology. She also organizes outreach events to provide YNHH medical professionals access to the library’s resources. Judy Spak, Assistant Director of Research and Education Services, facilitates active learning for medical students. Judy and other librarians teach in the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing curricula. Head of Access and Delivery Services Melanie Norton oversees circulation services, the information desk, interlibrary loan, documentary delivery, acquisitions, and cataloging. In addition, she educates students and professionals about available technology in the Library and organizes student wellness activities such as therapy dog visits and study breaks. I found medical librarianship to be the most interesting work I encountered during my internship, and possibly a future career path.
Why I found this internship valuable
My internship has given me new confidence in my career choice, an understanding of the complexity of a large academic research library, and the opportunity to create a resource network of passionate library professionals. It re-emphasized for me how exciting and impactful the work of librarians can be and will influence my career path choices after graduation. I would highly recommend an internship in the Yale Library.