Creating Undergraduate Internships for non-LIS Students in Academic Libraries

Dahl, Candice, 2011, “Creating Undergraduate Internships for non-LIS  Students in Academic Libraries“, Collaborative Librarianship vol. 3 no. 2, pp. 73-78

In this paper, Candice Dahl provides a framework for implementation of a ‘library intern’ program [my choice of words, rather than Dahl's] within academic libraries, specifically aimed at non-LIS students rather than student or new-graduate librarians. She profiles the existing internship program at her library, and looks at some of the issues and problems surrounding the setup and ongoing success of the program.

This article piqued my interest because before I left work in March, a similar idea was being thrown around by my then-boss as part of a reshuffle of our library system and planning for future recruitment and liaison with the various faculties of the university. The idea was going to be that there would be graduate internships for scholars in the various fields covered by our University’s faculties, where the Library would not only provide salaried positions but would also pay the intern’s fees for studying their Masters in librarianship. It was met with a great deal of scorn and disgust – partially, I think, because it was mentioned with many other ideas which were not particularly well-regarded, some of which were put into place and were not popular. This one got tarred with much the same brush, possibly unfairly.

There were lots of wacky ideas coming out of the big office last year...

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think it’s actually a very good idea. And I’m going to make myself very unpopular by saying this – but I think for academic librarianship it might actually become more than just a good idea and perhaps move into the “necessary for survival” column, for a number of reasons:

• Graduates from faculties and schools outside LIS know stuff. Your average chemistry 3rd-year knows far, far more about chemistry than a librarian armed with the Kirtk-Othmer encyclopedia ever will. Even if said librarian’s been brandishing said encyclopedia for 40+ years. Sorry, but it’s true.
• Most LIS graduates come from Arts and Social Science backgrounds. And try as we might, it’s very difficult to get an in-depth knowledge of things like Law, Medicine, Science, Engineering without disciplinary education.
• Following on from this – most librarians like librarianship. They signed up to be librarians – if they’d wanted to do Law or Medicine they’d have become lawyers or doctors. They are happy to dip into the disciplinary content of a given field enough to be able to talk the talk, and can develop over time an understanding of key sub-topics, authors and resources within the field, but all this is done without an in-depth knowledge of the subject itself, and thus, I would argue, no real feel for what the scholar in said field needs.
• Yes, I know the argument exists that “but the Chemist doesn’t know anything about Modern German History, so they won’t care about questions about Modern German History at the library desk, and they won’t help the students properly.” This might seem harsh, but students are going to the internet way before they’re going to the library desk, and if their question is complex enough that they can’t find their answer through basic online research, they need a subject specialist. Either their lecturer/tutor, or a subject specialist library researcher. So rather than expecting the Chemist to be a generalist (as librarians currently are) maybe we hire a Historian too.
• That’s not to say we need an Organic Chemist, Metallurgical Chemist, Inorganic Chemist, Toxicological Chemist, Ancient Historian, Medieval Historian, Modern Historian and Historiographer. I believe that there can be some degree of generalisation. But even an Organic Chemist will know more about inorganic chemistry, or at least where to look for information on organic chemistry, better than a historian might.
• It’s not all about answering reference questions. Increasingly, the academic librarian has to be a specialist in resource selection, data curatorship, publication avenues and multi-repurposing of information through different projects and media. It’s hard to do all of that without knowing how someone in that discipline thinks, what their major requirements, influences and triggers are.

One of the major obstacles in all this is getting a non-LIS student to intern at the library, let alone ever consider making a career out of it. Dahl talks about how identifying enticing incentives for students to intern at the library can be tricky (once you get past offering course credit, that is). The problem compounds when you look at creation of graduate posts:

• Say, for example, I’m a law student, staring down the barrel of graduation. I could take a library internship, do more study and earn $50k a year. Or hey, I’m now a lawyer, and if I can get a job, I’m probably earning $80k first year out. And in ten years’ time, I’ll have probably tripled that per annum, whereas I’ll probably still be on $55-60k in the library. So if I’m smart enough to get a job as a lawyer, I will, simple as that.
• Substitute any other profession which earns you more than librarianship (read: pretty much anything) and it’ll be exactly the same story.

Ever heard the old maxim “those who can, do – those who can’t, teach”? It’ll be pretty much like that - with not much incentive for high achievers to select a library internship and library career path, the library ends up with either no candidates from the field, or second-rate ones (though you could argue that this isn’t much different from the way it is now.)

Plus, then there'd be lots of out-of-work librarians... and what would they do now Borders has closed?

I would have liked to see Dahl provide a bit more of a critique of how these internships ended up being of benefit – to the student, for starters, but more importantly to the library. Why is it useful to have non-LIS students dip their toes into the librarianship pool?It’d be cool to see in a couple of years whether any of those interns followed a library path. It’d be even cooler to take it wider than just the English department, into one of those faculties where Librarian wouldn’t be the first-round draft pick in terms of career options, to see if the internship did anything to attract the intern to continue in libraries longer-term.

So, questions for readers (please do comment!):

• Have you got an internship program at your library? How does it work? Where is it headed?
• Is it fair to librarians to think, in terms of future workforce planning, “disciplinarian then librarian” rather than the other way round, as we currently do? Or does that devalue the profession?
• What would attract high-paying professional disciplines to elect to take their knowledge down a Library path instead?
• Is this whole idea just crazy? Is internship for students workable, but for graduates impossible?

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