UCLA Internship

I am so excited to be here. The day passes by so quickly and I cannot believe I am already through my second week. On my first day, Kristen and I discussed what I’d like to work on during my eight week stay and I’m thrilled to get a broad spectrum of experience. I’ll be working on a survey of journals housed in the SRLF, offsite storage facility for the UC system, and how the collection condition is compared to an in-house copy on campus. I’ll be developing a standard condition report form for when the library loans out items for exhibitions. I’ll be swapping positions with the Huntington Library fellow, Amanda Burr, for a week so we can observe a different lab environment. But, that’s not it!

Perhaps the most fun for me is the hands on experience. I never seem to get enough time playing with paste and, with the experience from the Cal State Library, I am gaining even more at UCLA. It is great seeing the different ways a lab can be set up and how one procedure can be preformed a number of ways. One poor book that came into the lab this week had so much of it’s binding missing that I get to rebind the entire thing! I hope I’m always this excited about scraping, cutting, sewing and pasting. It’s like a meditative trance that I get lost in for hours only to come back up for food and bathroom breaks. Well, must not forget the talking. I always seem to get caught up in talking too much, while holding sharp objects. My hands stay in meditative mode and my brain wants to ask a thousand questions.

Here's where all the magic happens: