From Head Cataloger Nina Schneider

The Clark Library is fortunate to welcome two UCLA Information Studies students for a 30-week internship in the Cataloging Department. Conceived as a program that will provide hands-on experience to graduate students interested in a career in special collections librarianship (and a head start when they enter the job market) while simultaneously assisting the Clark librarians process some of our acquisitions, the interns will spend fifteen weeks working with an archival collection and creating a finding aid that will be mounted on the Online Archive of California. The other fifteen weeks will be spent cataloging rare books related to the archives they’ve processed. The internship will culminate with a capstone project of the interns’ choice. Whether it’s an exhibition, a lecture, a website, or a paper, the final project will provide a chance for the intern to share what they’ve learned about the collections they’ve cataloged and serve as a major project for inclusion in their portfolio.

This week we focus on Gloria Gonzalez. Gloria has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Mississippi, Oxford, where she also majored in Religious Studies. It seemed appropriate for her to focus on the collection of the late philosophy historian Professor Richard Popkin. She will be working with his research papers and antiquarian books from his personal library. Gloria comes to us with excellent skills. In addition to this internship and taking classes full-time, she’s working for the Center for Primary Research and Training (CFPRT) at UCLA Special Collections. She describes her work there:

I worked on the [Margaret A.] Porter papers and other collections from the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive until May, and then began working with accessions (still under the CFPRT). Using an “accessioning as processing” method, I create accession records, determine appropriate levels of MPLP, process collections, and then create brief cataloging records. I also serve on the YRLSC Digital Projects Committee, under which my work is currently centered on researching emerging best practices and technology needed for accessioning, processing, and providing access to born-digital materials in special collections.

Summer of 2011 was spent as a Junior Fellow for the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress. While an undergraduate she processed and digitized archival materials in the department of Special Collections in the University of Mississippi’s J.D. William Library. When we asked her what she would most like to accomplish in her career and how an internship at the Clark Library would relate to that goal, she stated that she wants to make an impact on access to rare and unique items in special collections. That’s a goal that seems within her reach.