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SI ASB 2010 Recap

The 2010 University of Michigan School of Information (SI) Alternative Spring Break resulted in another week of great experiences for the entire SI community! One hundred and twelve students departed the weekend of February 27, 2010 to Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and new to 2010, Detroit. This was the 12th year of ASB at SI.

SI ASB Internship Featured on NPR!

On All Things Considered, shortly after its coverage of President Obama's commencement address, NPR's Guy Raz interviewed SI grad Jamie Niehof, on her experiences as a New York Public Library intern delivering books to prisoners at Riker's Island jail. The audio and a link to Niehof's blog are on the NPR website.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126442657

Fundraiser for SI ASB 2011: End of Year Rummage Sale!

Do you have extra clothes/dvds/furniture/etc. you want to sell?
Do you want to buy used clothes/dvds/furniture/etc on the cheap?
Then bring your stuff and/or yourself to the Ehrlicher Room next Wednesday 4/28 from 2pm-5pm.

Mining Digital Assets at NYU: Second Reflective Blog Entry

I gained the skills I expected to gain. Granted, I was unsure about the environment, unsure about what I could learn in a week, and unsure about what to expect in terms of skills I would gain in general, but I came out with a very positive experience. I had hoped to learn a little about digital preservation workflows and about practical issues related to the process, which I did.

Lifecyle Policy Team - Archival Research Catalog - NARA - Second Post

At my project with the Lifecycle Policy Team at the National Archives and Records Administration, I learned a lot about the process of implementing policy in the federal government and creating standards that can work for all parties involved. This requires more than just knowledge of policy and technology; it requires good communication skills, both to hear what everyone’s concerns are and to effectively communicate what policies people need to follow. It also requires some diplomacy to get people on board with policies and to do what they are supposed to do.

First Blog Post

My ASB internship was at the Law Library of Congress, working on identifying metadata for websites that were archived during the 2005-2006 Supreme Court nomination process. My expectation going into this project was that I would learn how the Library of Congress creates web archive collections, crawls these collections, and interacts with archived websites. I also expected to learn and implement a novel way to extract metadata from archived websites.

Second Reflection

ASB was an eye opener for what it was like to work in an organization that was currently short staffed, while the work load had not lifted any. I was able to see through my mentor the type of dedication and work it took from all the employees to keep the Registrar and Cataloging department running as smoothly as possible. From this I was able to take away the point of view that must be taken when dealing with these sort of situations and the work ethics that made this place still stay on its feet.