Internship: First On-Site Day

Yeah, I know, I know--more about my internship. Well, I do have to continue posting regularly about it for credit. But I will post again this week about something not related to my internship, so stay tuned.

Yesterday was my first of three (possibly four) days over the course of the semester that I will be on-site at the library where I have my internship. A lot of Marin County is beautiful, so my drive (at least when I got into Marin County) was scenic. I actually pass through the area when Scooter and I are heading to our favorite coastal town, so I was moderately familiar with where I was going. The Technical Services department for the library system is actually located on an old army base. The work area is in a remodeled hangar building, and I was able to appreciate the aesthetics of the building's structure. It was fairly obvious that many of the surrounding buildings had recently been remodeled or built from the ground up, and from the front door of the building you can see newer private homes. One of the neighboring old hangars was still under construction.

The Technical Services team encompasses a group of staff with multiple purposes and duties. There's the staff that's in charge of processing all items purchased by the library before sending it off to the branches for shelving. There's the staff in charge of ILL and Link+ (a program many SF Bay Area libraries are members of) requests. There's the cataloger--there was only one for the whole county library system! I know she must be a very busy lady. There's my site supervisor who oversees my internship and several other Webmasters Team staff, and of course the library IT staff who are often in and out of the office as they head out to branches with malfunctioning equipment. And there's the staff that works with the county library's subscription databases and library catalog data, one of whom I got to speak with for a few minutes. He was discussing some of the growing pains with adopting the Encore interface that they very recently started using, as well as the difficulties of trying to maintain the Encore-run catalog and the classic catalog. He noted that one of the (relatively) nice things about the classic catalog is that the files and data are maintained on a local server; when something goes wrong, they have direct access to the files and can work on fixing the problem. With Encore, as with any service maintained by a vendor, the data and files are all on a remote server; when something goes wrong, they must rely on the vendor to fix it--which can have varying results depending on the vendor. I would say this is definitely a con of cloud services: you have less control over your content. But, as he mentioned, it would cost the library more to hire the people needed to do the same thing on site. It was an interesting conversation, and I appreciate him giving me a few minutes of his time so I could learn.

The main room that houses this team of people is not much unlike the office space in your average building--except for the books and other library items. There were so many of them! My hands were itching to pick up one (or a dozen) and browse the shelves as I would the library stacks or the shelves at a bookstore. The desk area where I worked for the day was right next to a full wall of shelves and I couldn't help but glance at the titles every so often, picking out ones that I knew or at least heard of. My site supervisor mentioned shadowing one of the people who help process items next time I'm there--I'm going to have to be extra-careful to keep on task and not browse as I work. Perhaps I can browse during a break.

Yesterday, I was tasked with updating a page of the staff site. The page where all the library system-wide policies and procedures are kept needed to have some items deleted, and the remainder updated with ownership information. It sounds like something I could do at home, but I was glad to be there to complete it. First of all, I had to work off a paper packet rather than a digital list. Second, my site supervisor made many notations that I had to ask about, mostly abbreviations of the departments that had ownership of the item. It would have been hard for me to ask as many questions as I did if I had been working from home. I liked being able to walk over to her desk and simply ask "How do you..." and "What is..." It's definitely much easier to collaborate in person.

The rest of this week will be spent on updating another page on the staff site in a similar way. Many of the abbreviations are the same, so I will have far fewer questions and am already familiar with the process. I'll also be updating user permissions for all the users on the staff site (something I definitely know how to do since we've gone over users already in my Drupal class). Someone--not sure if it was a fellow internee or the internship instructor for the MLIS class side of the internship--mentioned that as we go along, we start to gain confidence in our abilities. I think I'm starting to see more of that in myself this week.