Growing New Catalogers Through Meaningful Internships

Internships have the potential to be an incredible learning experience for students, but without thoughtful preparation, they may be nothing more than a short-term job for interns. In this presentation, I'll discuss how I developed a better, planned approach to the internships I manage using the Core Competencies for Cataloging and Metadata Professional Librarians document and the NACE Career Readiness Competencies. I'll also discuss how I utilized principles for effective teaching and course creation to craft an internship objective and learning outcomes, which helped with creating content and learning activities that prepare interns for their hands-on project. The result is an internship which combines theory and practice into a meaningful experience.