Experience of a summer intern with the Library
Hi, I’m Romany, a soon to be 4th year Social Anthropology Student, and I am spending the first 6 weeks of summer working as the Library User Experience and Communications Intern. The library has been huge part of my student experience throughout my degree and I leapt at the opportunity to work with them. I’ve always been enthusiastic about doing a summer internship knowing the positive impact that it can have on skill development and gaining experience of the working world. However, rather than buzzing around the library like previous interns have had the opportunity to do, Covid-19 shifted the role of the Library Intern to a remote one. So that means, yes, I am currently writing this blog post in my childhood bedroom in Midlothian!
I have just started the fourth week of my internship (is it really week 4?! Oh my has time flown!) and overall it has been such a positive and educational experience! As an intern I am conducting research for the library to help them adjust their services and spaces to reflect the needs and wants of the students. As the library has been essential in my own university studies, I love that I am able to be a part of shaping it’s future in a post-Covid world (is there such a concept?).
My first week was a rush of introductions via Microsoft Teams, getting to grips with the goals of my research, familiarising myself with software such as Nvivo (a useful tool for analysing data!), and planning studies such as focus groups and customer journey workshops to hear directly from the students about how they experience the library. All of this was broken up by slightly unreliable Wi-Fi, many cups of tea and cuddling a very cute German shepherd puppy. To research I have been using ethnographic methods, which is exciting for me as I have been studying ethnographic methods for three years now. Social Anthropology uses ethnography as its main researching method, so this internship has allowed me to put my knowledge and studies into practice! The great thing about ethnographic methods is that something could come up in an interview or focus group that I never even considered before, so it is a good way to find out how the library can improve its services!
I spent some time brainstorming a way of incorporating participant observation into my research. Being remote makes it slightly difficult to immerse myself in the student library experience and observe how students move through the library while chatting to them. After contacting some previous lecturers in my academic department, I decided to try out participant diaries! The idea is that students would use the library and document/reflect on their experience by writing a diary entry. As they would remain entirely anonymous, this would hopefully give me an honest account of how some students felt about the library and how they moved through the space and highlight any issues in the library that are personal to the students. One week later and the diaries were out!
During my second week I also researched other libraries and their social media pages. While the library’s Instagram account is continuing to grow (yay!) other social media platforms aren’t doing as well. It is something that I find quite interesting, as it seems to me that the time of Facebook is fading. Personally, I only use Facebook as a messenger and the occasional St. Fessdrews or Mapstone Condensed guilty pleasure, whereas Instagram is my go-to social media app. Admittedly I, like many others, spend far too much time scrolling through the explore page and stories. I am only not a huge Twitter user and while I have an account I rarely use it. So, as an intern I am looking to see how we can increase the libraries Instagram engagement and potentially the engagement on other social media platforms. As well as researching other libraries, I am going to test this by holding an Instagram takeover next week where I will try to get followers engaged by using Q&A stickers and polls. Also, if anyone thinks that the library should create a Tiktok account please do let me know, I will pass the knowledge along the library hierarchy.
I have also been running customer journey mapping sessions about how students access their course materials online via Microsoft teams with participants. These have been an interesting journey for me as I learnt more about conducting them after each session. It has also been lovely to chat to students from different academic department and see how they interact with the library website and think about how this contrasts with my own usage. My next step is gathering all of the information and creating an infographic or report to present to the library staff. I also have several focus groups organised, the first one taking place tomorrow afternoon! While I am a bit nervous about it, I am also looking forward to hearing from students and hopefully having a fun discussion. I know that I am going to learn a lot about leading discussions from these and value the opportunity to develop my researching skills. As you can see, it has been a very busy few weeks!
Overall, I have already learnt a lot from my internship, and I have in no way covered everything in this first blog post. My first three weeks has allowed me to develop communicative skills and gain an insight into the workings of the library, but it has also taught me a lot about myself and ways of overcoming personal challenges. Working at home is difficult and while it is not a new experience for the world with many people having had to work at home for over a year now, knowing that there are other people doing so doesn’t really make it any easier. Between bad Wi-Fi, screen headaches, and working alone it can be easy for me to get into a funk and struggle to stay motivated. However, this is a learning experience and everyday am trying to stay positive. I have not just learnt about different software, how to conduct research, various areas of the library workforce, and just how much work goes into running the library, but I am also learning a lot about what type of work environment I may see myself as a part of in the future as well as what aspects of working get me excited and what areas don’t quite thrill me. The highlight of my work so far is talking to the students and getting to explore my creativity through discussions with my supervisor, brainstorming ways to increase the social media engagement, and creating posts for the library Instagram. Despite some challenges, I have loved the past few weeks and cannot wait to see where the next three weeks will take me!