The DLS ensures a valuable learning experience for Library Interns

Posted on September 14, 2022

The Department of Library Services (DLS) received 12 interns, who started on 1 July 2022 on a six month Internship Programme, funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). These colleagues were all based in different units or faculty libraries, including the faculty libraries of Education (1), EBIT/NAS (1), and Theology (1); the Music library (1); UX (2); Scholarly Communication (2), and Library Technical Services (LTS) (4). The interns based at LTS, were on a rotation basis and all of them spent some time at the Learning Centre, Digitisation unit, and Marketing and Quality Assurance office too.

Our aim is that they learn, and get exposed to most aspects and trends related to the DLS. We, therefore, organised a weekly event, in the form of a seminar, where relevant topics were discussed. As we realised that other DLS staff might also find these sessions useful, we decided to open some of them for all staff members to attend.

The first learning session was presented by Sunette Steynberg on Bibliometrics and patent searching. This session was only for the interns, but the first open event was presented on 11 August 2022, titled "the lifecycle of an information resource". At this event, colleagues from different units presented on the different processes involved in making our collections available and accessible. The topic for the following week’s session was “ethics”, which covered academic and information-related ethics, such as copyright and plagiarism, as well as work ethics and professionalism. Both these sessions were very informative and all participants (interns as well as permanent staff members) actively participated in the discussions. Everybody agreed that they found the presentations as well as the discussions very interesting and valuable.

On Wednesday, 24 August 2022 all interns got an opportunity to give feedback on their learning experience so far. Each intern was required to do a formal presentation of approximately 10 minutes to an audience comprising of fellow interns as well as permanent staff members. Colleagues from UP’s Career Services unit also attended the session.  We were pleasantly impressed to learn how much the interns had learned so far and that they all regard this programme to be a valuable contribution to their career development.

 

- Author Marguerite Nel

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