An Internship at the Fred A. Hopf Library, College of Optical Sciences

By Robert Talbert

The goal of this article is to convince other SIRLS student to intern, as I did this Summer, at the Fred A. Hopf Library, College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, Tucson campus. Since my goal was to work at a small rural library, this small library was the perfect place for me to gain experience. Except for my supervisor, I was the only staff in the library. My first library and I own it.

Upon my arrival I found stacks of books and DVD's in need of Check-in and shelving. In retrospect I could not have had a better introduction to a small library environment. Checking-in those items allowed me to ease into the job. During that first week, while shelving books, I was able to enhance my skills using the LOCC and learn the database system, without the responsibility of cataloging and inventorying the collection. This semester I have copy cataloged sixty six of the one hundred and fifty donated books and twenty five shelved volumes, previously not cataloged in the database. In addition to those I cataloged and shelved twenty five dissertations and masters thesis. I performed one complete shelf reading and separated about one thousand of the Reference volumes from the Open Reserve collection to improve the manageability of the collection. At the request of the Assistant Dean I created a report detailing the loss of books from this and other collections, with recommendations on how to curb those losses.

Even with all that work there is plenty to be done, so please consider an internship at the Fred A. Hopf Library, College of Optical Sciences. For more details see My complete Internship Report.