Friday, November 04, 2005

One internship started...

So I finally started one of my internships. After MUCH frustration and a LOT of red tape, I started at the environmental engineering firm this morning. It was awkward and unpleasant and I thank God that I did not sign up for 150 hours there like I would have done had there not been 6 weeks of paperwork hassle.

The librarian is not so much a librarian as he is a 'resource-getter.' Requests for articles or books come to him and he simply has to find the best way to obtain these articles. He might trek to one of the local university libraries and photocopy the article or retrieve it from one of the databases they have access to... He might interlibrary loan it... He might buy an article on a per-article basis... I'm sure there are other options.

I did expect the library to be smaller, though. It has six or seven compact shelving units as well as a couple metal regular units, too. And there seems to be little free space for new acquisitions.

We spent the three hours I was there walking back and forth to his supervisor's office, where the supervisor never was, as well as trying (unsuccessfully) to get in touch with someone from Human Resources. He also had me search Worldcat and submit an ILL request to obtain articles that were requested that day. On Monday, I apparently am going to help organize things, which sounds more exciting at least. He promised I'll get dusty. Good times, no?

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