 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine, we do record the show as we are doing today. And it is then posted to our archives page for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For anyone who is here who is not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. So we are the state library here. So we provide services to all types of libraries in the state. So we will have shows on Encompass Live that could be for all types of libraries, public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything. Really our only criteria is something libraries are doing. We do book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations for us about things that we're doing here at the commission. But we also have guest speakers that we bring on sometimes. And that's what we have with us today. Today from, obviously here, as you can see, from the University of Nebraska Omaha. We have Claire Gelene and Wendy Guerra and Lori Schwartz who are all part of the UNO Library's archives in special collections there. And they are going to talk about how they've done some interesting things in their internship program over the last couple of years. So I will hand it over to you, ladies. Wonderful. Thank you so much and welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us here. We're just going to get started actually first with our land acknowledgement. So it's appropriate to acknowledge that UNO occupies the traditional treaty lands of the Omaha and Otemizori tribal nations whose sovereignty existed long before the state of Nebraska. We would also like to express our respect to the Ponca tribe of Nebraska, the Winnebago tribe of Nebraska, the Santee Sioux tribe of Nebraska, and over 170 other tribes represented within the Omaha area. Please take a moment to consider the legacies of more than 150 years of displacement, violence, settlement, and survival that brings us together here today. At the University of Nebraska, we respect and seek out inclusion of differences, realizing that we can learn from each other, and we look forward to building long lasting relationships with the indigenous people of Nebraska. For more information about this, you can check out the UNL Native American Coalition website. Okay. Again, welcome, everyone. So while our presentation ultimately focuses on our new internship practicum program, it was born out of the pandemic. The part where we were all working from home five days a week in 2020, and then slowly transitioning back. Our experiences were likely similar to many of yours. A rush of anticipation and preparation for working from home, the dawning realization of challenges ahead, some fumbling and stress as projects stalled, some wins as projects moved forward, and here we are. So once we were back on site enough to interact more, Wendy, Claire, and I sort of jumped into this internship program project. We weren't charged with creating it. We just saw a need and started working on it, because we're fairly nimble here. We had, we all had very casual conversations about the spontaneous nature of random interns and volunteers who reached out to us for placement just before and during the pandemic. This random nature resulted in our workload doubling without knowing ahead of time and sometimes more. And that really threw off our ability to plan and reach goals, as you might imagine. So this effort was born out of necessity to fix these unsustainable method of random students and workload issues, while also trying to make a better experience for our students. So one of the overarching themes of this work was building an ethically conscious program. Over the last few years, especially, there has been a lot of conversations around the topic of invisible library and archives labor, student labor, and caring for those working with potentially harmful content. We wanted to integrate some of this thinking into our framework. It's one of the reasons we are so clear that students have to be in a library or library adjacent program and receiving course credit when completing their internship since we cannot pay them. We also wanted to create a workspace where students had some agency in selecting the project areas and any secondary projects, which we'll talk about later. It's really important to us that students feel like their work matters and is visible within the department. These are just some of the areas we considered when creating this framework. So we're going to each share the last year and a half of intern experiences and projects in our areas of archival processing, digital initiatives and outreach before moving on to discuss how we went about designing our internship program and its various elements. And then we'll share lessons we've learned during the two pilot phases before wrapping up with how we plan to move forward in 2022 and beyond. OK, so I get to start with processing. So as the Hegel and Technical Services Archivist, I manage a team of staff and students in arranging and describing the U.S. Senator Chuck Hegel archives and have recently taken over management, arranging, managing arrangement and description for all the department's collections. The nature of the Hegel archives collection of around a thousand cubic feet across 15 distinct series or groups of records has allowed me to assign processing projects from small to really large and simple to complex. Lately, the rest of the department's collections have opened up more possibilities. So this variety of projects benefits student employees and interns of all experience and education levels and with differing amounts of time to devote to processing, which definitely comes into play here. During the virtual component of the pandemic, I supervise five students working on remote Hegel and other digital projects I hired and trained two student employees virtually and supervised a practicum student in arranging and describing parts of the digital Omaha COVID-19 collection. So in the summer and fall of 2020, two students left the department and I hired two new students aware that remote work would require changes to our orientation and training process. Because typically we're very hands on here. Previously, onboarding was done via a notebook plus conversations with me plus some required readings. So I converted the notebook to a PDF and I altered training activities to accommodate remote work, saving some training for when students transition to onsite things that made sense, like orientations to our space and more hands on training required to get into the nuts and bolts of arrangement and description work. I met with each student over multiple Zoom sessions to review required readings to provide a forest level view of the collections and to explain the very basics of arrangement while focusing on description and our finding aids database archive space. Then I assigned them to digital projects so they could switch out tasks during the long hours they were spending at home between both work and online classes. I emailed every Thursday or Friday to gauge their progress and how they were doing in general, just with life. This did not always go smoothly as the students were juggling responsibilities and stress, but it did keep them moving forward. Then I had a practicum student work on a digital collection, the Omaha COVID-19 collection, which I already mentioned. They needed a virtual arrangement and description project for a graduate archives course. The department has other digital collections, but the COVID-19 collection was at the right stage to accommodate the students course requirements, and it only required a couple hours of prep by me to make it happen, which was key as there was little lead time. This means it was done on the fly and without the benefit of the start to finish structure of our new internship program, as we were still working out details at that point. So the student gained experience sorting individual files, creating a file structure and crafting folder titles and narrative description. I met with them on Zoom to orient them to talk processes and challenges and to teach them archive space, which was essential because that's where they were going to be doing a bulk of their work. And this student also had health issues during that time because it's a reality, and so that required extra flexibility as well. OK, we do a question just popped up here. I don't know if you're going to get into it or not. You mentioned the COVID-19 collection. Are you going to get into what exactly that is or what that came from? You know, I'm not really in the scope of this presentation, but yeah, it was basically something that Claire and I were tasked with at the start of the pandemic because we knew that someone needed to be collecting some COVID-19 related material. I think because we knew, you know, what happens when you don't diligently collect material for something like this. We knew there'd be lots out there in the ether, right? But we wanted to make sure we were collecting things related to our university. And as archivists by trade, that's the first thing I know that would come to all your minds. And yeah, although those people are not in the business that where I would be like, oh, yeah, that was very like much our conversations, like just with our friends and family and the community. Oh, that's a great idea. You know, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. Thanks. So I started working with my first practicum student in fall of 2020. And it kicked off a busy year of managing remote projects for interns. Each student experience provided the opportunity to learn and implement better methods and I built off of each one. With my first student, I felt a little bit like I was making things up as I went along and well, I really did have a plan for their work and intentionally communicated over Zoom and email to form a connection not really possible by email only. I thought there was a lot of room for improvement with my method of delivering instructions for digital projects. My student was able to complete basic metadata entry into our digital asset management system. I love Dora, but I feel like their experience with me was rather shallow. So by the spring of last year, I had a much better idea of the experience I wanted to offer students while also ensuring that their work was beneficial to the goals of archives and special collections. But I took my second student working on an independent study in their LIS program from LSU. I created a work plan and a schedule for the projects they would complete. The skills they would learn and the software they would gain experience using during a set time frame. And well, it took more work up front to design an approach that incorporated my onsite student employee scanning to create digital objects for the intent to work on remotely with trial versions of software. The outcome was significantly better than my first effort. The student was able to learn how to create mod records in Oxygen XML editor, how to embed metadata in digital objects using a trial version of Adobe Suite. I provided instructions using Zoom, email and detailed tutorials I made using VidGrid. With my third student joining me remotely from the University of Washington high school, I felt comfortable expanding their work plan to include a small project and connection with Claire to help round out their short internship with me. I used the same instruction methods and software trials as I had with my former student, with one change being an increase to the student's level of responsibility and access in Island Dora. And initially, this was a bit of a stretch, if not like more than a bit of a stretch for me to entrust a student with greater access to our digital asset management system. But ultimately, it went great and it was really awesome that it expanded the learning opportunity for the student. I'm joining us in late May of last year before the intern was our first official pilot effort. This is a hybrid student from Mizzou, and they had a learning plan and schedule that included the main focus on digital initiatives paired with some side projects with Lori and Claire. Planned informational interviews with other library staff, a final presentation and an exit interview. The hybrid nature of his work allowed him to work around his full-time job while gaining important hands-on experience with physical and digital collections, including processing, scanning, writing mods, records, embedding metadata, and creating research for an outreach project. Instruction incurred in-person over email and via video demos. The communication with him was really quite extensive as we were hoping for a lot of feedback to help us prepare and better improve for pilot phase number two. Lastly, the PIS student I worked with was primarily Lori's intern for the second pilot, and with the student, I only had 15 hours of project time and we will talk about that experience a little bit later on. So for my projects, outreach serves as one access point for researchers to work with archival material. It's important that students working with me understand that outreach ties directly into digital collections and processing, as it is a key facet of collection discoverability. This has and will continue to be a guiding principle for me as I work forward in this. And one of the reasons I was so engaged with crafting this intern program was to build upon my own experience and proficiency in supervising students. I can create or implement small projects with some level of agility and short notice, but previously I didn't really have any experience being a supervisor. So the first project to come student was something of a spontaneous addition to my workload. I was not supervising her directly, but in passing conversation, she expressed an interest in exhibit design and installation, which are two functions of my job. She started a side project with me for our monthly display cases. I met with the student to discuss how we would do about selecting materials, creating labels and installing the display. Within this small project, it was important that the student gained experience in using the catalogue and finding aids, searching the stacks and engaging with primary source materials. Additionally, it was important that there was trust in the interaction, as the student was rather nervous. While we worked on this project over the course of a few days, the student opened up about her college experience, some frustrations in the program, and hopes for next steps. I appreciated her frankness and the trust she placed in me as we worked together, and I hope that if she has questions in the future, she will reach out. The image on the slide you're seeing is the case that she helped me carry. For my grant student, I was the only supervisor for this long-term and complex research and outreach project. The student had a little experience working with primary source material, but not a great deal of knowledge of working in an archives. I wanted him to feel like he was part of the department team, at least intellectually, as he was working remotely. But in an attempt to make the student feel welcomed, I pretty much overwhelmed him. I assured him that we were working along ethical and compassionate lines during COVID, that I wanted him to find personal value and interest in the work. I gave him way too much freedom in selecting where he started research. The student dove in way too quickly into materials and started drowning in specifics when he didn't have context. He produced piecemeal things that which I wasn't really sure how to explain were wrong or incomplete. Thankfully, we were able to correct course pretty quickly. He and I talked about the larger programmatic deliverables, and I showed him where his research would specifically influence and support this. There have been other positive outcomes he has asked me to serve as a reference for his grad school applications and the work he's produced will help increase collection access and discoverability. So the benefits of our internship structure, even in these early stages, is evident by the work of my third student. This pilot's two student was supervised mainly by Laurie, but had a side project in outreach with me and another with Wendy, as mentioned before. Before the student started, Laurie shared the schedule and the number of hours that the student would have, roughly with Wendy, myself and Laurie. We mapped those hours out and the tasks we would have the student work on. This simple document provided structure which invariably, which was great when the student invariably came to my office and said that they were ready to start. So this student curated two flat case displays and created social media posts about the exhibit, which was items in our collection to celebrate LGBTQ plus history month in October and posts about their work processing. I wanted this last set of posts in particular to combat the idea of invisible archival labor and invisible student labor. And so the photo on the screen now is the student with the case that they curated. Since we've all talked about our initial projects, does anyone have any questions about what we've shared so far? Let's see. Yes, if anybody has any questions, you can type into the questions section of your go to webinar interface. I've got that open here on my computer and I can grab any of your other questions you might have. Nothing came in since that first one. Great. OK. I can't see when you're typing to just so you all know when you're doing the questions. Unlike some things I can't tell. So I have to wait till you actually hit enter and see if something pops in there. Well, I can start on the next slide. You're welcome to interrupt. So now time to talk about our internship program design. So Claire and Wendy and I all had our own ideas and experiences about this as interns ourselves back in the day and later as supervisors. And we knew we wanted our design to include empathy and be ethically informed. As a grad student, myself, I had one official internship, a practicum and random other practical experiences. My practicum was a whirlwind 60 hours teaming up with two classmates in this wild warehouse. One supervisor checked in on us twice and we barely knew what we were doing. For my official three hour credited internship, I interned at a state archives where I scanned photos and intern metadata and the photos were really cool, but it was not a well rounded experience. I stayed in one room. There were no enrichment activities and I didn't learn about the broader processes that my work was fitting into, say for a 20 minute tutorial for my supervisor about their digitization set up after I pestered him. This was 18 years ago and I'm betting that their internships are structured differently these days, but this is one reason why I was on board for bringing structure and well roundedness to our internship design. I've supervised about 15 interns as a professional and most of them haven't been part of an official program, but I suppose due to my earlier experience I typically supply all sorts of value added components of probably talking my interns heads off as I give them loads of contextual information about their projects, our archives, the profession in general. So now with this program design, this whirlwind can be filtered through a structure. I completed my MLIS entirely online while I worked full time and that situation required me to fit internship experiences around a very packed schedule and in a very specific geographic region. At the time about internships were few and far between, I'd even say rare. I would think that one benefit of the pandemic is that we've learned that some of our work can be accommodated to be performed remotely, especially a good bit of digital collections work. So I entered into this design planning stage with the idea that I specifically wanted to ensure opportunities for people who might not be able to relocate or work a typical eight to five schedule. I suspect that the library and archives field misses out on a fair bit of talent that we weren't able to encourage or give opportunity to simply because people can't make onsite internships happen for whatever reason. So with that in mind, I also felt really strongly about designing experiences that were beneficial to both the student and archives and special collections. It's easy to quickly get burnt out by adding additional projects onto our required work and goals. So my experience has definitely influenced my desire to create a track or a main project that could be done remotely during hours that could accommodate the reality of distant student schedules. Hence my reliance on trial software programs, cloud storage and our web based digital asset management system. So the two internships I had as a student during and directly after grad school were both great because they were extremely well rounded. And I felt like I was part of a department and not just a student grunt worker. These internships are both relatively self directed, which was nice to have a little bit of freedom and agency that even within a broad structure. For the one during grad school, I was charged with a theme and a rough outline of an exhibit, but I had the freedom to map the contours of the work. Similarly for the post grad internship, I selected a track with the projects within that track were of my choosing. I learned a great deal from both internships. But as far as the deliverables were concerned, one was more successful than the other because I had a supervisor who was extremely engaged. My second internship, I did a lot of that daily work, but sometimes at the expense of those larger projects. However, it was it's really important that the UNO internship be well rounded and include kind of that glamorous project based work, as well as the more possibly mundane but daily activities that are necessary to make an archives or special collections work like shelving. Those tasks were really important to me during my internships because it made me feel like I was part of the normal workforce and not just a special projects person. So when we actually sat down to design these program elements, we started out with a really complex track system with a primary track and a secondary track with optional side projects, depending on the number of hours the student was working. And it quickly became overly complicated with parsing out percentages of hours that could be worked, how students would indicate their track preferences during the application process, how we will applicants know what tracks were available depending on the archivist's availability. It was a lot. It was too much. So we decided that it would be better for students to pick one area of focus, in this case, digital collections, outreach and processing. And then depending on the number of hours they work, they could incorporate side projects. My best internship experience occurred within a formal program at a large historical society starting with a competitive application process. This was good practice for the future. It was guided by a learning plan supplemented by informational interviews and evaluated by a final presentation with my intern cohort. So when Laurie Claire and I started trying to figure out what elements we needed for our intern program, we each contributed several examples of programs that we admired. The elements in design were also influenced by our desire to create well-rounded experiences while understanding that students are on the human. And so are we. So for some elements of our internship design, our ideas shifted over time, lots of conversations. For a learning plan, which would list objectives, learning objectives and the projects they would complete with us, we spent a lot of time going back and forth on how vague versus specific we wanted the learning plan to be for students that did not have a plan from their home institution and library program. For example, we had one intern whose program had a very basic learning plan. Another interns learning objectives on their institutions learning plan were so broad as to be useless for their purposes and ours. So we wanted the learning plan to guide a student's work and ensure that the projects they worked on have tangible results that demonstrate a learned skill. We also wanted to use required readings to prepare them for the internship and to fill any gaps from our specific areas of expertise that a student may not have been exposed to in their formal classes. This would help all interns start on a more level playing field and maybe even develop a learning peer relationship among our intern cohort where possible. So Wendy and I had each each selected readings to fit our two interns and our areas of expertise processing and digital projects and then later compiled them into a listing that we could use in the future. And so we've already we are we also selected some basic and more advanced readings that give an overview of the archival profession that we could assign based on an interns educational level that we discovered through the application process. We also knew early on that we wanted to incorporate informational interviews to provide a more well rounded experience beyond what we three can provide. We suggest interns talk to reference and instruction librarians, interlibrary loan specialists, catalogers, systems folks, etc. We require they prepare for the interviews by looking up the interviewee and crafting questions to make the interview meeting for both participants. And to round out those required elements, we wanted our interns to give a final presentation and take part in an exit interview. The final presentation helps the student reflect on their work and understand their takeaways from the internship, like what they can add to their resume, how the work accomplished their learning objectives and what can be applied from their coursework to their coursework or future employment. We also wanted the exit interview to be a meaningful tool for reflection. We wanted to provide feedback about their projects and offer insight for how these experiences can be applied to their careers. And of course, we also wanted to hear from them about what was meaningful, what did and didn't help them understand the project. We asked them to complete and so on. One element we decided to institute was a formal application process. The image on the left is our working document and the image on the right shows the final form that's available through our website. The application is intended to give students experience applying for jobs and to give us the information we need to select students to work with us. We simply can't take on every student that seeks an internship with our repository. I'm sure we've all experienced interns before who we realized once they were on board didn't quite have the intentionality that was needed for them to thrive and for us to see benefits from their time with us. Our application process is intended to help prevent or decrease the chances of that happening and to also reduce the likelihood that we'll have more interns at any one point than we can handle. After launching the application we did update it with information to reflect that applicants will be reviewed on a rolling basis until we hit our maximum or the deadline. And we spent a fair bit of time determining what to include in that application. It was important that students come to this internship or their internship with a sense of the work that they would be doing and how they'll play a role in the overall function of the department. Even if the internship is required by a library program it was still important that they know that it was a time commitment and we wanted students to be aware of hours, timelines and deadlines. We hope that by sharing the website and application with library program chairs and directors we can avoid any last minute shuffling. So we do have a question about the applicants themselves. So I just just wanted to clarify. Are you is this just for students in a library program or is or is yours open to any student? So our internship program is open to library students or students in what we consider library adjacent programs, history, public history, degrees, anything that would have some reach in an archives or special collections we are happy to have an applicant from. The main thing is that they have to be in some library related programs so that they can receive credit because again we cannot pay them. And it and it is open to anybody in any program, not just UNO students, not just our home institution. OK. Thank you. Yeah, that was a good question. So when creating this application we tried very hard to set expectations about what we expected from the applicants. This includes points about this being not paid and for credit only and that UNO doesn't offer housing and that interns may have to undergo a background check as per campus policy. We also tried to be very clear about submitting the learning plan, the program requirements or internship requirements that a student's program would require their academic program because I mean every academic program has different goals and expectations for their internship components. Some very specific and others quite vague. We tried to clearly indicate that whatever information about your program was available, we would like to receive it. One of the lengthier sections of the application is the description of elements of the internship and areas of focus which they could work in. So we spent a lot of time on this part as we've already talked about. We tried to map out rough time estimates and percentages of work so that prospective interns would have an idea of what their time with us would look like. We also tried to explain, you know, the main project and the side projects in a way that was clear and not overwhelming. Orientation and readings, informational interviews and the end of the internship presentation. Sorry, I lost my place as tends to happen sometimes in slides. Our department, oh, in particular, I would say the informational interviews and the end of internship presentation. Our department is on a different floor from the rest of the librarians. And so it's easy, I think, for students at the very least to feel a little bit separated from the rest of the library. We feel a little bit separated sometimes. So our hope is that students will interview librarians and employees outside of archives and special collections to understand how other departments here work and how our work is connected to them because we all work very closely together. The presentation, as Wendy will share, has real benefits for our students. Not only does this ask them to reflect and explain their work and how it can be integrated into their schooling, but it gives them material to use for job interviews. And going back to the point about students understanding our expectations, we do require that students submit a CV and a cover letter. The CV will help us understand what relevant coursework the student has completed and the cover letter will force the student to think about this as a job and not just a thing that has to be done for school. From previous experience of going over student application packets, it's fairly clear that most students don't know how to write a cover letter or a CV. For me, at least one resume in particular stands out for being completely aspirational as opposed to showing what the student had accomplished. To try and help students, we included links for writing CVs and cover letters to the application, which actually in our most recent round of student applicants was very helpful as both of them mentioned that they use those links and model their application CV and cover letters on them and found those resources very helpful. So we definitely appreciated that feedback. And so this MOU or contract language where we ask students to confirm their understanding of the program allows us to have some expectation of the student's seriousness. We did originally have students upload documents directly through the Microsoft form, which is the application platform that we use. However, we realized that that wouldn't work for students outside of our home institution. So now we have directions of how to email the cover letter and the CV on the application, which is a great test to see if they can follow directions. All right. So we're going to try and place a link for the URL to our internship program page in the chat and we'll try that. Wanted to double check and see if there were any questions that we could address. I've got the link here. Good deal. That should have been the chat gone out to everyone in the audience. Also, I'll just mention two while we're seeing. So if anybody has any questions, go ahead and do any more questions type into the questions section. Also mentioned these slides will also be available afterwards with the recording. So when the recording is posted for this sometime tomorrow, we'll also have a link to the slide presentation. So if you're looking for anything and you want to look at that again, and we'll also this is this. Is this link also linked from somewhere in the slides or should I include that separately? People access afterwards it might depend on how we shared our slides. If we included the notes for accessibility or trying to remember how we shared our slides. I think I sent you the full PowerPoint, so they should be right. Yeah, I have the phone. Yeah, then only gets in our house. Yeah. Yeah. OK, cool. All right. I want to make sure. Yeah, if there's no questions, we'll continue. But again, if you have questions, please put them in the chat and we will answer those. All right. So the first pilot of our program was admittedly a little disorganized as we tried to navigate main projects, side projects and I went on vacation as people do. I think it's important to remember that we're serving soon to be new professionals, but we also need to maintain some time away and that helps us keep at least a semblance of work life balance. And on that note of work life balance, it isn't just we, the supervisors that need it. It is our students too. There was significant flexibility for real life timing in this internship. Well, I stressed to my intern that I needed him to show up when scheduled and do the work he was assigned to do. I also understood that a full time job and graduate classes could result in rescheduling and adjusting of plans sometimes. In some of my internship experiences, I remember feeling like I couldn't possibly ask for a schedule adjustment and I never wanted that to be an environment that I promoted. Just as we need students to expect or to respect us as people, we need who might need time away or sometimes just need to reschedule a plan. We need to give them the same respect. The learning plan used for this first pilot was predominantly the one provided by the student's MLIS program. It was incredibly broad in order to be applicable to many situations and all students. And that's appropriate. However, my student and I did end up going back and forth trying to determine just what tasks and project work fit under which objectives. And I would say that some students, perhaps not all, but some will need more specifics to understand how learning outcomes can benefit them and then translate into real world resume content. So from this first pilot, I had something reinforced. It is really hard to estimate processing times unless you are having students work on a very simple set of processing steps. And I assume you could say the same thing about a lot of different projects in the library and archives worlds. Even then, you know, every student wraps their brain around processing at a different rate. And I can definitely say that with certainty after 17 years of teaching them how to do this work. What made this first pilot intern experience challenging was estimating what someone with no processing experience could get trained on and accomplish in just 15 hours. For the next side project I guide, I will pare down expectations so that the intern is more likely to see a final product from their efforts. I can usually find an hour or two of work to add on to the end if needed, but this way they walk away with a sense of accomplishment and vision for all the steps of processing. One of my main takeaways was to write things down. If I have a meeting with a student about a side project, I need to send an email repeating the project, sharing links and giving time frames. Pilot one student wasn't a student at UNO, so access to certain documents was tricky in the beginning. There were no problems with the project expectations or timeline for the student, but needing to send out multiple emails for document permissions made me realize it would just be better to have a project template to share. One of the most valuable pieces of feedback we received from this first pilot was how truly critical hands-on experience is to being successful in the job market. And we probably already know this. We've likely all lived those experiences of multiple internships, taking enough experience to pair with our formal education just to get our foot in the door. But despite knowing that, it was valuable to have it reinforced. From this first pilot intern, we heard that this experience was the ideal culmination to my graduate experience. The largest gap in what I have to offer professionally was practical experience, which I received in droves here. This exit interview, the presentation and the practicum as a whole are the best possible preparation I could ask for. That was some really excellent feedback to receive. The experience was clearly critical for them. They were hired at UNL Libraries a few months after their internship ended and they attribute their success to having gained some practical experience in the field. Yes, we were all very excited about that. For him. So we recently piloted our second intern through our program. And they wrapped up their internship at the beginning of November. They arranged and described a collection in our Queer Omaha Archives, described and housed artifacts from the Hegel Archives and completed several smaller side projects in outreach and digitization with Claire and Wendy. They spent about 30 hours with Claire on outreach projects and 15 hours with Wendy on digital initiatives. Their final presentation and exit interview went well. As a supervisor, you never want to hear anyone anything surprising. And how an intern is describing the work they did and the challenges they encountered, which has happened to me before. But this didn't happen here thankfully. What we've learned was that the intern picked up some missing knowledge from the readings and found the structure of the program really helpful. I learned early on with this internship that internships with multiple main and side projects would benefit from more precise scheduling at the outset. You know, and or better communication between supervisors. So for an internship of 140 hours, which this was, they were scheduled for 15 hours each in outreach and digitization. And I had built out a schedule at the start with input from Claire and Wendy on how much time to spend each day on which projects. I did not schedule times within that day. Orson Calendar invites. I don't know if that's necessary. That takes a lot of time to schedule. That's still up in the air. However, I could have upped my communication to compensate for what I call schedule squishiness. They were scheduled for outreach work many days in a row. And as the days added up, their time spent in outreach went over bit by bit until they had doubled their time in that area by the end. But I felt the intern was reaping benefits from this time. And Claire wasn't complaining, but mainly because she didn't know it was happening. So I didn't say anything. And my intern was having a great time, honestly. And they really loved going back and forth to all the projects. So I want to see that too, you know. So however, my decision to not say anything hampered my planning for the interns other projects. So I should have checked in with Claire sooner to better gauge the remaining time and plan ahead accordingly. You know, sometimes you're just like full steam ahead and you kind of forget to take those side those stops along the way. Another thing that illustrated to us the importance of sticking to the learning plan. The intern felt pressured mid internship by their academic supervisor in their grad program to spend more time on digital initiatives than we had all agreed to at the beginning. However, Wendy didn't have more time to give. For the sustainability of our internship program, we were determined to stick to the plans where possible so that everyone's time can be respected so that our schedules don't get worked warped by external pressures. I ended up coaching the intern on how they could explain to their supervisor that learning to process and learning the ins and outs of our online database, a database used by a lot of archives across the U. S. We're also valuable elements of archival work. So as Laurie mentioned, our shared our shared students spent about double the time on outreach with me as was originally anticipated in the schedule. And after going over how and why that happened, I realized that social media took way longer than I and Laurie anticipated mainly because I assumed the student was following the hours allotted on their schedule. So I just didn't check in with them. And that was something that I need to be mindful of in this next iteration. It will be good to compare the original calendar, the actual hours and how we want to adjust that time frame for future interns. Similar to the project follow up template that I mentioned earlier, I need to make a social media template for students to follow. The intern that crafted various posts had great content, but the posts were far too long. They contained bullet points and links to photos in their personal Google Drive that I couldn't access when the time came to post. So again, my lesson here is to make templates. I don't mean anything prescriptive. It does not serve me or the interns if I end up ghostwriting the posts or the exhibits, but providing clear expectations surrounding word and character count, finding a balance between educative text and context of the item, the number of images that should be uploaded, I think would be really helpful to make things run more smoothly, as well as having shared folders that I create that students have to upload the items into will help tremendously with the posting time. So this second pilot entering was the shortest amount of time that I had to recruit the student and I dramatically overestimated how much content was reasonable to cover in a 15 hour side project. Well, I was able to teach the intern everything from scanning through post production to ingest into Island Dora. I felt it was a shallow experience for them and it was one that put a lot of pressure on me in the days surrounding their work. It was what they had requested, but I think that in the future I need to be more mindful of what is realistic. So in the future, I will aim to provide a deeper experience in one or maybe two areas of digital projects, hoping that that will allow the students to actually gain familiarity with the process instead of briefly trying to cover everything I can with an intern and only really providing them with an awareness of the work that I do. So it always makes me laugh. So moving forward, we are looking forward to welcoming our first two non pilot practicum students for spring semester. They're starting this week. In fact, one started yesterday and one starts tomorrow. These students are from UNO's undergraduate library program. We found that our application process worked as we hoped. So yay. They followed directions, submitted their application materials on time and told me they use the resources we provided to work on their cover letters and resumes. So that was lovely. I also met with each of them after they submitted their application materials, which I found really helpful to discuss the elements of the practicum in person, even though they could read them on the website and to fill in that learning plan we talked about. In this case, their program didn't have a learning plan. And so we use the one that we developed in-house. I found those meetings to be really helpful in setting expectations and even building some excitement for their practicum experience because I love supervising interns and practicum students and I want them to get that same joy out of it. So internal communication is going to be key to the success of this program. The point we made earlier about the outreach hours creep is a good reminder that this program can only function if we three are communicative, honest and receptive to scheduling. The empathy and respect that we want our students to experience must extend to the three of us as well. Previously, we didn't want to advertise that we offered internships because of the ethical issues surrounding unpaid student labor. And moving forward, I can't say that we'll explicitly advertise, but the information is publicly available now on our website. I'll continue to connect with advisors at various schools. Connections have already been made at UW Madison, UW Milwaukee and LSU and also the University of Washington High School, which may be an option in the future if we wish to become one of their designated programs. So we hope that by intentionally designing an internship program grounded in ethical behavior and empathy, we can successfully attract students who wish to gain practical experiences while contributing to mutually beneficial projects in the UNO archives and special collections. Thanks so much for attending. If there's any more questions, we are happy to answer those. Yes, of course. Great. Thank you so much that. If anybody does have any questions, anything you want to ask, we still have at least about 10 minutes left in our official hour this morning. So please do type in your questions in the question section. I'm thinking a lot of no more about anything you were hoping would have been mentioned that they didn't mention yet. We can always expand on anything. So thank you, Wendy, Claire and Lori. This is great. I as as you're going through everything that you did, I was, you know, this is very specific to your situation at your library and in the archives and things you had to do there. But I thought it was great how a lot of it could apply to any internship program that anyone may be doing, that there's certain things that you do need to be paying attention to. And, you know, being aware of what what your interns are doing and really, you know, supervising and monitoring them, especially if you're new to this, new to being a supervisor, as I think it was Claire, were you the one that said you had never heard before? Yeah. That there's so many things that you just don't think about that you don't, you know. So I hope that people outside of university archives will watch this session and learn and get some good tips and things for doing internships. We just recently ordered internship grants we provide here at the Library Commission to Public Libraries to help them bring in the idea is also to bring get people interested in becoming librarians at some point. And if you come and work at the library, you'll see how awesome it is. And so I'm hoping I'm going to definitely refer them to this session just to get some more, you know, tips and tricks and ideas. Yeah, so much is like organizational just trying to get things set up ahead of time and then making changes. You provide them with resources for that and you know, suggested, you know, examples of, you know, a schedule of what they could do and ideas, but you know, everything has to be specific to your situation. So we do have a question here and something along here so I'm going to read through this see. Okay, so here's a question from Amy. Can you share some of the strategies you have used with interns who are uncertain about what they could do during their internship. For example, they just don't know what an informational interview is or what kind of work they could be doing in an archives or library. This may be during the application process or during the actual internship. So some strategies you've used for interns who are uncertain about what they could do, like they come in and they just reply and they're just like, I'm not sure why I'm here, but I'm here. Maybe that's the situation. We've definitely had that. Please jump in Claire and Wendy, but in fact, one of our practicum students wasn't quite sure what they wanted to do and so I actually met with them even before they submitted their application materials. They just wanted to ask some questions after they'd read through the website. And so I chatted with them about the different areas of archival work and then practically speaking, what the areas were that we could actually work with them in this semester. Going back to that, we have to keep it sustainable for both us and for them. And so after talking with him back and forth, he realized, oh, I think really, I would love collection management and processing. So, you know, that does take time to talk through that with them. But that was that worked. That was really helpful. And then, you know, as far as what's an exit interview, what's an informational interview, that kind of thing. We also talked over that as well because they had read the website, but I wanted to give them a good idea before they applied because it seemed like they really craved that knowledge. So we talked through all that. And that reminds me that that was some feedback that we had received about like, oh, like a person, a student may not know what processing is. They might not know what digital initiatives is. A lot of people don't. So that was one thing that we had discussed updating on the website and providing some resources. Or short description. We haven't yet to make that change, but it's a good reminder. Yeah, I think we were talking like, well, I could, one thing I could do is link to the, you know, SAA's Society of American Archivist Dictionary of Terminology. I'm like, yeah, I don't, yeah, that's still up for discussion. You're getting your interns are these, you know, they're in library school and maybe new to it too. I've never worked in any sort of library before if this is they're just getting started with their education for their career. They are maybe feeling around a little floundering even and just wondering, so I want to do libraries but where what and yeah, this is something librarians we work we deal with even dealing with our users too and our patrons of using our own terminology and assuming they know what kind of would assume someone in library school would know, maybe brand new just to it and we just don't realize, yeah. Yeah, I during my initial meeting with this one student, you know, I asked them if they knew what some very basic sort of overarching principles and archives were and they, you know, vaguely remembered them from an intro class and intro library class and so, you know, I was like, aha, so I wrote down that, you know, one of their readings that I signed at the beginning of the practicum needed to be a chapter that I had that focused on those exact principles and they really appreciated I think that sort of immediate offer. Yeah. So another question here you mentioned looking at what the information that these interns got from their schools about what their internship should include that some of them are good information some were useless or not so well as for what they needed to be doing. Do you ever have any direct contact with the universities about what they are putting in their intern, you know, saying to their students this is what you need to do as an internship, like do you get to talk to the people at in the UNL, well, you're in UNL maybe the UNL program or even to other ones saying we will offer internships but we need to work with you so do you have any communication with these universities or is it just your each doing your own thing and hopefully it matches. I will say that the student that came from Miss U they the communication between me and what would they be called be the coordinator maybe that would be it was fairly minimal it was, you know, it definitely served the purpose for both of us and the student was able to be successful but and I'm even comparing it to now like my communications with like a professor at LSU it was they have the goals for their program and I'm not going to I'm not going to come in and impose and say like hey this is missing from your program it was more of just like recognizing maybe what could be more beneficial or like taking into consideration that like yes these really broad concepts are appropriate and for like most students you know they're trying to meet a lot of needs but for some students they really need help understanding like how does this task that I'm doing fit into this much broader concept and how does that then translate to something I can put on my resume and talk about the potential job interview so the conversation conversation with students not so much I guess for me anyways I don't think I would feel comfortable talking to a program and saying like hey I really feel like this is missing from your internship program it's interesting is wondering if from their side with I mean they have their own goals of what they want their students to know and that's what's in their program, their plan and hopefully there's something out there that will fill those goals you know and as we go we'll develop I think more and more of these relationships with various academic programs so sure yeah once they see you know you've done this and like you said you had successful on the whole point of it getting more people in the fields hiring in the job yeah so before so I have a question before you did this I can't I wasn't sure did you have an internship program before what you did you about pilot program or is this the very first time you all have done this we didn't have a program but we still took interns and practicum students it was just random and not coordinated but we were always bouncing ideas off of each other so we realized by combining forces we could make it better for both both sides sure and now it's a much more organized yeah probably a lot easier to plan and incorporate yeah into like okay we're looking ahead in the spring semester like you know so I wasn't able to take an intern this semester that was good to know and like have that you know I have for everyone to be aware of that before someone showed up on our doorstep demanding digital collections yeah sustainability was key that word along with what roundedness kept coming up over and over again we wanted to be sustainable for us it has to be you know and less stressful too I'm sure that if you have this plan that you can refer to rather than oh let's figure it out you know by the seat of our pants when someone comes like you said when he knocking on the door yeah yeah we want to help students because that's just in our nature you know as librarians but there's that finding of the finding balance that's important mm-hmm alright I'm just just hit 11 o'clock by my clock here does anybody else have any last minute desperate questions you want to ask of Claire Wendy or Lori you do have their contact information there of course to their emails so you're welcome to email them afterwards if you think of anything but I don't see anything coming in right now I think that's okay I think we can wrap up for this morning then wonderful thank you everybody for being here this morning thank you Lori and Wendy and Claire this is great information as I said I think it's going to be very useful to a lot of people and I'm going to be once I get the recording out pushing it out to our internship grants that we just awarded here to our libraries to see if they want to get some tips and tricks and how to do their run their programs that's great thank you thank you I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen to do my wrap up here here we are alright this is the session page for today's show and I did here's the link that was sent in the chat I will actually add this to the session description I think I'll just link off of there so people have a quick access to it as well the internship program page on the UNO website this is our main Encompass Live page if you use your search engine of choice and just type in Encompass Live we are the only thing out there called that nobody else is allowed to use that name there are upcoming shows at our archives that I said I was going to show you here are right here there's a link to our archive shows the most recent one at the top will be at the top of the page so today's will be here should be done by the at the very latest end of the day tomorrow as long as go to webinar and youtube cooperate with me everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know when your recording is available they'll be a link to their own recording we use the Nebraska Library Commission's YouTube channel for that and a link to the slides we also post out on to our various social media places while we're here in the archives also show you you can search our show archives see if there's been a topic on show on a topic that you might be of interest to you you can search the whole archive or just the most recent 12 months we want something very current and that is because this is our full archives and I'm not going to scroll all the way down but this goes back to when Encompass Life premiered in January 2009 so we've got 10, 12 years worth of shows on here so just to pay attention if you are watching an old show to the original broadcast date everything is a date on it letting you know when it was first done some of our shows the topics will stand for the rest of time and still be good and useful but some things will become old and outdated information maybe have changed drastically links might not work anymore some websites and things might not even exist anymore but we're here talking about archives this is something we do as long as we have a place to host our shows and keep them up there we will keep them all available just in case anyone does want to watch any of our shows going back to the very beginning as I said we do have a Facebook page let's talk about social media for Encompass Life if you do like to use Facebook give us a like over there we do reminders just reminders to log in to today's show info about our speakers when our recordings are available we post on here we also post on to our Twitter accounts and Instagram using we have a hashtag Encompass Live a little abbreviation for the show so you can look for that out there as well our next show will be I've got some I'm going to be filling in some more March dates I'm in conversations with people getting some descriptions nailed down so keep an eye on our schedule here but next week I hope you join us and our topic is United for Libraries moving to a bigger better platform United for Libraries is division of ALA for library trustees advocates friends and foundations and since ALA has a new learning management system for all of their training and educational things United for Libraries will be using that as well and Beth Nelinsky is executive director United for Libraries will be with us next week to talk about the changes coming so please do sign up for that and there are other future shows we have here on the schedule so thank you everyone for being with us today thank you again Claire and Wendy and Lori this is an awesome session I am so glad we're able to get you on the show thanks so much for having us thank you thank you and hopefully we'll see some of you with this in a future episode of Encouples Live bye bye