Overview of Internship

The "Foundations in Librarianship" course with Dr. Williams included a month long internship at a library of our choice. I selected the Cheshire Academy Library because of the unique opportunity it afforded at the time I was looking for a library in which to intern. The library was going to be moving from one building to a newly built facility, necessitating an update to the mission statement and library policies. Because these were the essentials we were learning in class and because the library move was a unique opportunity I applied and was granted an internship.

It proved to be an excellent choice as there was one librarian who maintained all basic library roles of acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, reference and circulation and who showed me how she accomplished all these roles and quickly immersed me in the procedures. This proved to be an excellent introduction to the myriad of library roles.

With the assistance of the librarian, Claudette Hovasse, I learned to perform the following basic skills:

Acquisitions: Preparation of all books, includung the application of bar codes and stamps and cataloging.

Collection Development: Training in book donations and criteria to determine which books are appropriate and acceptable for the collection, including meeting with publishers representatives and perusal of catalogs and book review papers to select books for purchase.

Circulation: Instruction in how to create a new user profile and make a card for the user including assisting patrons on how to borrow boos out and return them into the system.

Cataloging: Instruction on how to search for records of books that were new to the collection and download them to the Athena library management system used by the library. Inputting local information about the book provenance, call number, etc. 

Reference: Training in reference suppor to determine how best to elicit information from library patrons and support in finding research information.

Policies and Procedures: Working with the librarian I was able to contribute to writing the new policies and procedures for the library. This was very helpful in terms of the foundation class as we were discussing the need and efficacy of comprehensive policies in print for libraries to have accessible for any member to peruse when necessary. The following project is the policies written for the Cheshire Academy library.