Internship in Information Studies
with Dr. Kenneth Lavender
In order to fulfill my internship requirements for my degree, I completed over 150 hours at RIT Libraries from November 2007 to May 2008.
During the course of my intership, I worked with Marianne Buehler, Head of Publishing & Scholarship Support Services, and Jon Jiras, Library Technology Specialist.
My work with Marianne Buehler mostly revolved around the institutional repository, the RIT Digital Media Library. Some of the things I worked on included standardizing existing author metadata (through a list of over 5,000 names), researching publication and copyright permissions for potential submissions to the DML, working with the Head of Cataloging and the Web Server Administrator to create more descriptive metadata fields within DSpace, and presenting new ideas for improvement of the service to my supervisor, Ms. Buehler, and other key stakeholders.
My work with Jon Jiras mostly revolved around myLibrary, RIT Libraries' supplement to the university's courseware, Desire2Learn. During the course of my internship, I worked with Jon to create a more dynamic and useful page using ColdFusion, Javascript, HTML, CSS, and PHP. The page content is based on the role of the individual (faculty member, graduate, distance, or undergraduate student) and the college, program, course number, and quarter of the course the myLibrary page is linked from. (Due to administrative error, the work was lost before it was launched. However, I've since been able to recreate a mockup of the site.) I also began customization of the latest version of ILLiad, ILLiad 7.3, with Jon.