I did my summer 2025 practicum at the Minnesota Music Archive. This was an amazing opportunity for me because it blended my love for music and archives together. In my Advanced Archival Management course that I had taken the semester before, we were tasked with creating a fictitious archive to create policies and an outreach plan. My fictitious archive was the Minnesota Musician Archive. I had actually never heard of the Minnesota Music Archive prior to this practicum, so it was great to hear that an imaginative organization could already be out there or exist in the near future. It was great to utilize the knowledge and skills obtained during the MLIS program in a practical, real-life setting. During the practicum, I worked on a variety of projects. I learned how to digitize CDs/Vinyls, edited documentation, researched how to digitize 8-track tapes, and worked on a research-based outreach project. I got more familiar with music equipment and software. I learned about Discogs, which acts as a database in which a submission must be in Discogs before getting accepted into the archive. On one occasion, I learned how to create Discogs submissions. I improved my technical writing, research skills, and overall knowledge of archives. Besides learning about Minnesota Artists, my favorite part of this experience was learning about what goes on behind the scenes in an archive. It was great learning about the archive’s history, donation process, and management of volunteers. The monthly archive meetings in which I attended also gave me a glimpse of how decisions are made. I loved going into the physical archive and every session I gained an abundance of new information. This experience is so valuable as an LIS scholar. I am so fortunate to have been paired up with an amazing organization with great people. I am excited to see what the future holds for this archive and will continue to show support. 

For my practicum, I was at the James Ford Bell Library at the U of M. I was working with the Bousquet Family Archive, which is a collection of letters, legal documents, and financial records pertaining to the Bousquet family and their descendants. The documents range from the mid-1700s into the 1820s, and nearly all of them were handwritten in French. Someone had started numbering documents and developing an organizational scheme for the collection, but it was left unfinished, and the existing plan needed some changes. I re-numbered and reorganized the documents, which took up the bulk of my time since there were well over 500 documents to track down and, in some cases, translate.

I really enjoyed working with my supervisor, Dr. Marguerite Ragnow (curator at the Bell Library). I sat in on some donor meetings, which involved people who had decided to turn over their family heirlooms or related documentation to the library, which was a very rewarding experience. The donors were very excited to talk about their collections and, in turn, hear about the information their items could provide for researchers, students, and professors who all use the Bell Library.

My favorite thing about my practicum experience was uncovering the story of the Bousquet family- it was wrought with drama, murder, legal trouble, and shady business, and it was so interesting to build the story of these people from the papers they left behind. I found a secret code written on the back of one of the letters, which is still undeciphered. Dr. Ragnow has a connection to someone with an affinity for codes and ciphers and is sending it along to him.

As someone who is really interested in history and historical archives, this was an amazing experience. Getting a glimpse into how institutions like the Bell Library work was invaluable to me, and I hope to find myself back at the Bell for research of my own one day.

For my summer practicum, I worked at the Minneapolis Central Library. My main project was putting together a document that proposed to include the library's collection of play scripts as a Notable Collection. I think I found the oldest book of plays in the library--from 1797! The committee will meet and discuss this proposal sometime next year. If it's approved, something I wrote will be on the library's staff web! Aside from that project, I also got to experience many different aspects of the library: I was able to see the Preservation department as well as do some work in there, toured the staff-only fifth floor, got to see what the Collection Project Manager does behind the scenes, toured the ILL department, worked at an information desk as well as the Best Buy Learning Lab on the main floor, and start a new project that I have continued into my volunteer work: moving the Putnam music collection to a new location on the third floor. I spoke with staff all over the building to get their insights into what they do and how they enjoy their work. I got to do so much during my practicum that I felt I was getting a very well-rounded introduction to library work. I really enjoyed being able to see how a library runs in so many different ways from an insider's perspective! 

Between May and August in 2025, I interned with the Andersen Horticultural Library in the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, MN. My routine with the AHL involved greeting patrons whose interests in the library ranged from an appreciation for its expert-crafted Nakashima woodworking, to its collection of books on gardening and the outdoors, to just wanting to take a break from the Summer weather. Our most regular patrons were children hoping to participate in scavenger hunts themed on the specific exhibit of the season (for most of my time there, this was "Fairy Gardens"). One of the first things most kids would see walking in was a fishbowl terrarium on our front desk, with itty-bitty snails you could just make out with a magnifying glass; they probably spent more time looking inside than in the stacks. 

I also assisted with some exhibition planning and preparation. This was mostly for the next seasonal exhibit for Maria Sybilla Merian's work on studying lepidoptera in Europe and Suriname, helping to describe the pupation phase in insects and creating beautiful artwork that we can appreciate today. In addition to selecting display items and writing materials for this general exhibit, I developed another exhibit within the rare book collection based on my personal fascination with misidentified/misrepresented organisms. Besides just being a fun topic to explore and present, researching how difficult it was for scientists to tell fact from fiction in these reports and specimens made me think about how much that reminds me of our modern-day anxieties over misinformation.

Off-site, I developed a digital surrogate for the AHL's 50th anniversary exhibit items on Pressbooks. This made the materials not only digitally accessible but also enabled the use of accessibility features like alternative text descriptions so that impaired users wouldn't be prevented from appreciating AHL's history. Pressbooks was a great tool to learn how to use, and one I'll feel comfortable returning to someday.

My experience with the AHL was an affirmation of every reason I wanted to work for libraries in the first place. Visitors and staff bring an enthusiasm to the space that makes it alive and a little spontaneous, while still keeping everything organized for everyone's ease of use. It's a place that rewards creative thinking and a passion for helping patrons, and I hope that more SCU students will consider AHL for a practicum experience!

My E-Resources and Digital Services practicum at Minitex gave me the opportunity to participate in the work of three different departments in the organization: Outreach & Instruction, Digital Initiatives and Metadata Education, and Cooperative Purchasing & E-Resources Services. Throughout the 12 weeks, I worked on maintaining and creating LibGuides, enhancing Wikipedia articles, and creating my own primary source set with materials from the Minnesota Digital Library, and updating their internal e-resource database that they use to help libraries in the region save money on e-resource purchases. For this last project, I used AI to help me develop a script that I could use to automate research on over 1,400 e-resources; my supervisor invited me back this fall to present the project at the Minitex AI Lunch & Learn webinar series for a session titled "AI-Assisted Review: Creative Solutions for Outdated E-Resource Data" on October 23rd.

The experience allowed me to look behind the curtain at some of Minnesota's regional library services. Collaborating with so many people across three separate departments expanded my conception of what it can mean to be an LIS professional.