1. Assessment Considerations for Internship Programs in a Time of Social Justice Expectations Laura Spears (with Laurie N. Taylor, Brian W. Keith and Elizabeth R. Dale)
Abstract: Libraries are adjusting to evolving academic and research environments. This requires new technologies and services, and the inclusion of professional expertise and abilities from multiple disciplines. Concurrently, the declining market for tenure-track academic positions and increasing competition for other professional positions are challenging to both graduate students, seeking career opportunities aligned with their long and costly educational experience, and to graduate programs, seeking to place their graduates in positions utilizing their hard-earned skills, knowledge and abilities. In this environment, students need exposure to alternative careers to expand their professional horizons and opportunities to gain marketable work experience. This presentation and facilitated discussion will review change management processes for implementing, with ongoing evaluation, of the Smathers Libraries Graduate Internship Program, including evaluative processes supporting the Libraries, librarians as internship directors, collaborating faculty members in other colleges, and graduate student interns. This includes both top-down organizational implementation and assessment, as well as processes put in place for grounded theory data collection and assessment for all involved. The session will conclude with a facilitated discussion on graduate student internships on campus, including payment rates, additional compensatory factors, learning outcomes, broader impacts for student career outcomes, and broader impacts for collaborative participants
Presented at Assessment in Higher Education: Enhancing Institutional Excellence, University of Florida Emerson Alumni Hall, April 5, 2019

2. Agenda Case Study with UF Libraries Graduate Internship Program
Background on need and opportunity
Program overview, goals and design
Program activities, example internships
Program and institutional outcomes to date
Facilitated Discussion
Change management: how do we enhance our capacity for care?
How could you implement an internship program? Or, how could you assess and improve your current internships?

3. The Old Idea of Internships
Link to video
Our library internships were traditionally better but really wild west. Many undocumented and no rigor to what qualified. Insufficient support for interns and those supporting interns. Question was: how do we develop infrastructure for support?

4. Case Study, Community Perspective: Conversations Transforming Our Communities
Expanded qualification sets for positions in LIBRARIES
From only ALA-Accredited MLIS, to PhDs and other advanced degrees
Changing nature of librarianship and the need for new skills
Focus on increasing diversity
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Fewer tenure-track and permanent research/teaching positions
Exceptional skills and subject expertise
Need for work experience, capacity for contribution
So we had a problem. We had other problems, too, that helped inform how to find a solution.
Feminist, grounded theory approaches.
Case Study: UF Libraries
Research shows that job requirements for the same skill and ability sets can be written to restrict or increase diversity. A common example is requiring a stand-in for the skills and experience required. For example, a job could require a particular grant only be awarded to select institution types, instead of requiring the skills and experience that could be obtained in many ways, including the specific grant. Many position postings for academic and research libraries have expanded beyond the MLIS alone to include a relevant advanced degree with appropriate experience, with this change often occurring for digital, data, and other technologically and subject intensive areas. This change has expanded applicant pool diversity.
Further expansion requires additional supports for applicants to garner library experience outside of the MLIS.
With these two conversations ongoing, we also have many conversations on how we can bring the libraries and graduate students and teaching departments closer together, for recruitment and job outcomes, and for the work we work together as part of our communities of practice, and our constellations of communities of practice.
These conversations are also happening while our Gainesville community is pushing forward on labor rights and living wage issues. And, while we see the reports, hear the shared stories, and sit with our graduate students who share their own stories on the unacceptable nature of graduate student work.

5. Community Conversation
We knew about the problems and could fully define because we were in conversation together.

6. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
A Library and an Academic Faculty member collaborate on a proposal for a professional level internship to deliver a CV-worthy project with outcomes benefitting both units.
Our goals:
Internships are proposed in and led through collaboration between librarians and academic faculty.
Awards are made via a competitive process, and the outcome for the student must include a “cv-worthy” accomplishment.

7. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Designed to complement graduate students’ academic careers for multiple job outcomes, including positions in libraries.
Mr. Patrick Deglaris, graduate intern in the libraries, and oral history program, who is going on to a tenure track position in libraries and oral history this summer.
Photo from:

8. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Prea Persaud is a former intern, and she is now a lecturer in NC. She’s also working to improve her social media use for her work, so this is her twitter page, and please follow if you’re interested in Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities, dLOC and Digital Scholarship.
Internship with dLOC and Digital Pedagogy (writing grants, symposium/event activities), teaching with DH tools.
Awards are made twice annually via a competitive process, which is open to all library faculty. Successful proposals are competitively selected in the fall and spring, and are funded by the Libraries to occur in the following semester(s).

9. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
The funding provided by the Program is exclusively for the graduate student intern’s wages.
The hourly rate of pay is $15 for a maximum of 160 hours (based on a typical internship of 10 hours per week, for a maximum of 16 weeks per semester).
The award per semester will not exceed $2,500 inclusive of fringe benefits.
International students and ability for additional income at the institution is critical because their work visas do not allow them to have outside employment at another place; they have to have institutional employment.
Dr. Poushali Bhadury, now at MTSU. Digital Humanities Working Group, THATCamp Planning and Implementation, Library Publishing and with her work there leading to new, related book forthcoming: B is for Baldwin.

10. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Proposal Evaluation Criteria
Points
Conformance to proposal requirements and quality of presentation 10
Quality of content and likelihood for successful completion
Value of the benefits to the Libraries 15
Value of the benefits to the Academic Unit and faculty partner
Value of the benefits to the intern 25
Supports work and activities in relation to diversity and inclusion 5
Opportunities that are time-sensitive (e.g., closely aligned with a current major event/initiative; external funding)
First-time applicants
Each proposal will be evaluated by the Internship Program Committee according to the above criteria, and recommended to the Deans in priority order based on the highest scoring proposals.
The Committee may seek clarification after submission and prior to award. This has evolved to serve as a kind of peer review.
This has also evolved to be part of creating capacity for care. How do we support interns and each other to grow our community and get our work done in a way that benefits us all?

11. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Eligibility:
Graduate students must be active and in good standing in their program, and must possess the requisite skills, knowledge, and abilities to successfully undertake the specific internship project.
The selected graduate student intern does not have to be from the same program as the partnering academic faculty member.
Dr. Randi Gill-Sadler is now an assistant professor at Layfette College

12. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Application elements:
Project Overview/Description (2-3 Pages):
Goals
Objectives
Deliverables
Activities
Any additional funding sources, including tuition waivers
Any additional academic evaluation elements including course credit, etc.
Image from Cuba Collections,
With two graduate internships on Cuban Bibliography

13. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Applications must articulate:
Impacts on other library departments
Benefits/Broader Impacts to the Intern
Benefits/Broader Impacts to the Libraries
Benefits/Broader Impacts to the Academic Unit
Student Learning Outcomes
Metrics for Project Deliverables

14. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Application elements:
Plan of Activities for Each Semester
Brief Position Description for the Intern
Hours/Days
Duties
Responsibilities
Qualifications
Francesc Morales, PhD in process in Spanish, and did the Spanish dLOC training webinars and intro. International student, and summer funding.

15. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Reports are due each semester:
Confidential evaluation for the intern.
Non-confidential survey response assessing the internship in relation to the metrics and deliverables from the application. Surveys go to interns, Internship Directors, and Teaching Faculty Collaborators.

16. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Internship experience includes:
Library orientation
Career and job search programs
Resume review
Emily Brooks Internship: identify and digitize toy and movable books, and to provide intellectual context and metadata to the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature digital collection ( well as document best practices for digitizing non-traditional books such as moveable and pop-ups.

17. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Open Educational Resources
Preservation, Spanish & English
Assessment
Digital and/as Public Humanities
Innovative Library Technologies
Cuban Bibliography
Visual Anthropology
Library Publishing, Online Journals
Florida and Puerto Rico Newspaper Project
New Tech: 3D printing, Arduinos, Pis
Bioinformatics
Data Management
Science Fiction Portal
Government House, Archives
Exhibit on Black Education in Florida
Literary Manuscripts
Architecture Archives
Collaborative Grant Seeking
Online Exhibitions
Digital Library of the Caribbean:
Myers Briggs Collection Bibliography
Digital Pedagogy
Digital Scholarship
Public Relations Campaign for Libraries
Instructional Design
Moveable and Toy Books
Children’s Literature  
The first semester saw one pilot internship funded for the summer semester.
The initial success of this internship, was an opportunity to refine and expand the Program.
To date there have been 44 semesters of internships, totaling over $100,000 in funding, with foci such as: Public Relations; Preservation3D printing; Data Management; Archives and Wikipedia; Collaborative Grant Seeking; Assessment;; Digital Humanities ; Digital Pedagogy; Digital Scholarship; Instructional Design; and Exhibits.

18. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Benefits:
Graduate students: career skills, increased opportunities, work experience, living wage ($15/hour), and professional development
Libraries: new partnerships with academic units, worthwhile projects and the potential for transformative collaboration, opportunity for recruiting diverse experts into libraries, programmatic approach to internships to ensure equity 
Librarians: professional experience, accomplishments, and/or scholarship
Teaching faculty and departments: opportunities to grow and connect constellations of communities of practice focused on graduate education; community capacity for care

19. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Evolution:
Program changes to the orientation for intern-community building
Proposal template, proposal review process, evaluation criteria
Potential for communicating library impact
Additional measures for assessment, with post-internship surveys
Program maturity, and working to support new Internship Directors
Program changes include adding a CoLAB to the orientation to foster interactions and community with the interns, internship directors, and collaborators
Program changes also resulted in relation to program maturity, with updated and refined materials, and a refined process that is now emphasizing new Internship Directors to support more people in gaining skills, and in growing their and our-library overall collaborative networks

20. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Outcomes:
These internships resulted in cultural change within the Libraries and transformative partnerships with academic units.
In addition, multiple former graduate student interns have accepted faculty or professional positions in libraries and academic institutions.

21. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Outcomes:
The Program fills the conjoining voids in libraries for expertise and in graduate education for paid professional internships.
It transforms the library into a career laboratory and professional learning space, and maximizes benefits for graduate students, libraries, and teaching department collaborators.

22. UF Libraries Graduate Student Internship Program
Future steps:
Based on the resounding success of the change implemented with the Graduate Internship Program, its committee has been charged to serve as the guiding coalition to create a new undergraduate diversity fellowship program to expose students from underrepresented groups to career opportunities in academic libraries - with the goal of contributing to the diversity of the field.
The Latin American and Caribbean (LACC) is hosting Katiana Bague, recipient of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Fellowship for Digital and Inclusive Excellence, during the academic year. The objective of this initiative is to expose undergraduate students from underrepresented communities to the field of librarianship and digital scholarship in order to promote diversification in the library science profession. 
Bagué is a fourth-year art history student at the University of Florida in Gainesville. While she specialized in Latin American art, she worked at LACC supporting public services, curating book exhibits, processing colonial Latin American manuscripts and researching Latin American books and material culture.
For more information on the program, visit the ARL website. To see the current roster of fellows, see here.

23. Project Deliverable Example
Romance languages librarian
Demi Wolfe Internship in Public Relations, a public relations campaigns class at the University of Florida took on Library West as their real-world client for the semester. Their goal was to develop detailed campaign strategies to raise awareness of Library West librarians and the vital role they play as subject specialists. These strategies include creating short, humorous “getting to know you” videos for each subject specialist as well as mini-commercials highlighting the unique expertise and services each librarian provides.

24. Facilitated Discussion
Topics to Cover:
Change management
Identification of stakeholders
Identification of communities of practice
Budget needs and scope
Considerations for care, generosity, and generative potential
The facilitated discussion on graduate student internships on campus will include payment rates, additional compensatory factors, learning outcomes, broader impacts for student career outcomes, and broader impacts for collaborative participants. This discussion extends an ongoing conversation in academia and other workplaces on procedural equity and justice in job training and internship programs. The concluding discussion will support developing critical infrastructure for capacity, care, and generous and generative communities of practice.

25. Change Management Create a Sense Of Urgency Build a Guiding Coalition
Form a Strategic Vision & Initiatives
Enlist a Volunteer Army
Enable Action by Removing Barriers
Generate Short-term Wins
Sustain Acceleration
Institute Change
Kotter, 8 step model

26. Identify Your Stakeholders
Your Supervisor
Administrators
Potential Team Members
Potential Internship/Assistantship Directors
Potential Student Workers
Others?

27. What about your program will inspire and motivate?
Your Supervisor
Administrators
Potential Team Members
Potential Internship/Assistantship Directors
Potential Student Workers
Others?
What is the vision that will appeal to these various stakeholders?

28. Identify Your Collaborators
Who else is supporting internships? Who all is engaged in student professional development, in transformational collaboration?
Who are your collaborators?
Within and outside your institution
Collaborative Communities: These people or groups might be involved in finding an intern, supporting a joint project, fundraising, skill development, supporting your work in directing an internship or directorship.
Who are your collaborative participants or committees; what are the roles for directors of internships; who will provide training resources and program support?

29. Identify Your Communities of Practice
Who are your collaborative communities and communities of practice?
Academic communities
Cultural heritage communities
Information practices communities
Advocacy communities
Collaborative Communities: These people or groups might be involved in finding an intern, supporting a joint project, fundraising, skill development, supporting your work in directing an internship or directorship.
Who are your collaborative participants or committees; what are the roles for directors of internships; who will provide training resources and program support?

30. Identify Barriers
How would your team and community address these?

31. Identify Your Budget Needs
How long?
Will you propose a single year pilot, for 2 or 3 semesters? Multi-year?
How many?
Will you propose one or a set number of internships/assistantships?
How much?
Living wage: $15/hour
Hours per week for many credit-bearing internships: 10
Weeks per semester: 12-16
Per internship, before FICA or other costs:
Minimum: $15*10*12 = $1,800
Maximum: $15*10*16= $2,400

32. What does success look like?
Shorter term
Longer term
Near term wins are important. What might these be and how would they be acknowledged or communicated. (In our program, the interns give a presentation on outcomes and these do not fail to wow!)
What would a successful program look like in the long term.

33. Make Considerations for Care
Internships and assistantships should support everyone involved in the work
How do we embody and enact generosity and to create an environment with generative potential?
What supports are needed for care?
What supports and communities will be involved in supporting the student, the directors, and the people involved in the program?
What other commitments will create sustainability?
Training support for interns? Additional opportunities for interns?
Who could serve as references for the interns? Who could support writing a project charter and other methods for supporting collaboration? HR support for the hiring process, and for supporting if problems arise? How can you support your team in supporting interns?

34. Thank you! Program information: http://cms.uflib.ufl.edu/interns/
Awarded internships, with proposals:
Slides:
Contact us:
Laurie N. Taylor,
Brian W. Keith,