Intern Volunteer Coordination

The purpose of this page is to document any ideas/thoughts/etc. regarding the set-up and management of BHL intern and volunteer programs or projects.

Brainstorming Discussion

Wednesday Feb 29 2012 @ 10:30AM EST via conference call
Attendees: Gilbert Borrego, Bianca Crowley, JJ Ford, Christine Giannoni, Trish Rose-Sandler
Agenda:

1. What kinds of work could they do?
2. What admin/tech barriers are there?
   1. - cgiannoni Feb 27, 2012Separate BHL Portal log-in's for on-site interns? Currently, I just have them use mine.
3. How do we track the work they do?
4. What guides/tutorials do we need to guide their work?
5. Hosting live/virtual volunteers/interns? BHL not an entity…
6. How do we recruit people?

See Content Enhancement Tasks
See Gaming

Notes:
Useful to think about tools that we currently have, tools that we might want to have for the future (WAY future, at some point)
Field has UMich Alt. Spring break intern, CG submitted a proposal to get an intern, and they are paginating now. Lure is that they get to paginate 200 page rare books, doing some serials as well and enjoying it!; other opportunities for students; pagination and adding BHL URLs into local catalog; students seem to find pagination rewarding; CG is also teaching volunteers to do this
- cgiannoni Feb 29, 2012Brief project description here: Intern Project Description.docx
How did you recruit?
- cgiannoni Feb 29, 2012I get approached frequently for hosting both short and long term students from local library schools, both LTA and MLS programs.
How are you teaching?
- cgiannoni Feb 29, 2012Provide the excellent pagination instructions. Sit down with the student and have them doing the work from step one.
How are you checking up on their work? Keeps internal spreadsheet about who's paginating. See example below:
Packing List to SIL_2011_03_1.xls

- cgiannoni Feb 29, 2012This is simply a modified packing list. For my purposes, this is sufficient. I do not maintain 1 master list. Once all items on a spreadsheet are paginated, the spreadsheet gets moved to a "Complete" folder for the year.
Students only paginating things that only FM has scanned
- cgiannoni Feb 29, 2012For now as we have a recent IA shipment that needs review. Have no issue with doing items from other institutions.
Paginating instructions on portal "are excellent"
What would help CG better manage/oversee their work?
Would be useful to have generic log-ins into the Admin Dashboard
CG recommends that you paginate with the book in hand, not always easy to paginate content if you don't have in your collection
GB paginates everybody's books (w/o book in hand),
JF doesn't have the book in hand either, actually Chris Carden does the pagination, Connie put a spreadsheet together of priorities for MCZ, an intern also helps
Is it worth it to take the time to train someone who is only there for a short time? CG: Yes, worth it b/c it wouldn't have gotten done otherwise, best for a practicum student avail for a longer period of time; depends on personality but students tend to be dedicated to the task
To train you have to do the pagination and have them watch and they'll pick up on it
Suggestions for improving tools: 1) re-sequencing volumes drag and drop? No 2) for paginator: articulating figures, maybe a drop-down? GB would need to think about this more
Decision: Interns/Volunteers need to come in and work f2f with a point person - need to be there physically
Seems to be no shortage of candidates
Local priorities vs. BHL wide priorities?
Oh! Look at Pagination Reports in Admin Dash -
Action Item: Trish can you talk to Mike about tweaking this to include status complete and who was doing the pagination? Also what is difference between status of "in progress" and "pending"? Can 2 folks using same login work simultaneously?
Action Item: Trish to check with Mike about generic log-ins, maybe 1 per institution for now e.g. "FieldIntern", "MCZIntern"
So is pagination the most important task?
What about having people go from pagination to Flickr to tagging for EOL to taxonomic nomenclature...
Background in Sciences or Libraries? Probably doesn't matter
What about Wikipedia work? Adding links to BHL books
CG: priorities are pagination, adding BHL URLs to catalog and then maybe adding tags to Flickr images
Article-ization? Would we want interns/volunteers to do this? Nah, probably good to wait until ML works with Rod Page to get his articles into
Action Item: CG to post her recruitment materials & spreadsheet example- cgiannoni Feb 29, 2012Done, see above!
Action Item: Would be good to work on some sort of centralized priority list of what to paginate...but how exactly would we do this?
Decision: Best to have volunteers/interns focus on pagination, then that task could spill over into Flickr and Wikipedia work, leave out article-ization work for now
Decision: Volunteers/Interns must go through/sign up with local institution b/c BHL is not an entity, BHL cannot host interns/volunteers but SIL, Field, MCZ can