Digital Library Center Internships

The Digital Library Center accepts applications for unpaid internships, based on project need. These internships are ideal for students interested in learning more about digital media production, data structures and organization, and the library.

Brief description: Working with materials unique to the University of Florida and materials that serve that mission of the University, the Digital Library Center provides a forward-thinking system for expanding the George A. Smathers Libraries in the information age. The Digital Library Center operates by digitizing materials, supporting innovative projects that reconceptualize materials, and working on collaborative projects that add to and enhance existing materials.
Number of Hours/Credits: 10 hours/week for a 3-credit internship (in regular fall and summer semesters) or as stipulated by the department or faculty advisor; most of the work is done on site.
Schedule Requirements: Flexible, but a weekly schedule will be set (e.g. M-F, 9-11; MTWR, 9-11:30) for the semester.
Prerequisites/Qualifications: Knowledge about and interest in digitization; a good attitude and professional demeanor; and willingness to work. Internship candidates must also have the agreement of an academic advisor and work with materials that promote understanding of their field. Internships will be contingent on project needs and interests. Current projects available relate to:
- Adding geographical information to digitized materials, and augmenting the data through KML creation and usability
- Supporting the Radical Women in Gainesville collection
- Metadata creation for the University of Florida Archives Photograph Collection
- Working on the Digital Library of Caribbean
- Working with the Digital Collections to promote the collections via news stories, press releases, and other websites (Flickr, YouTube, Picasa...)
Activities: Interns will be involved in a variety of activities relating to digital projects. They may work on any aspect of digitization, creating digital exhibits, creating promotional materials for the digital collections, and working to further develop digital collections and increase their use and usefulness.
Administration: Internships in the Digital Library Center are coordinated through Library Human Resources. In addition to any departmental or school forms, all interns are required to fill out the HR form for volunteer workers. Digital Library Center interns work in the Digital Library Center (200 Smathers Library, which is the Library next to Library West) and the internships are coordinated by Laurie Taylor.

Internship Process

Matching Interests to a Project: Prior to being accepted as an intern, a project will be identified. Interns will first learn the overall digitization process for digitizing texts and will then focus on the project work.
Timeframe: prior to being accepted as an intern.
Digitization Process: Interns will learn the full digitization process to learn how to complete each of the steps and how each set of requirements impacts the overall process. The digitization process includes: creating item records and initial metadata, scanning the item, image correcting, quality control and content description, processing for optical character recognition, metadata finalization, loading, and archiving.
Timeframe: weeks 1-3 of the internship.
Project: The project selected prior to the actual internship, will serve the basis for the rest of the internship. The project may include digitizing more materials following the steps above, but the project will be to create contextual materials, through finding guides, a collection or subcollection, exhibits, press releases, or a number of other possibilities. Any project will be used to mirror content development with technical experience, enhancing the interns skills by contextualizing and extending the technical skills to research and career skills.
Timeframe: remainder of the semester. Final draft project due by week 13.

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Digital Library Center Internships