Digital Internships Program
The Digital Internships Program is open to graduate students wishing to collaborate with librarians working in digital scholarship on campus. Students are recruited through a competitive process and successful applicants will receive a stipend and hands-on experience working in one of the opportunities listed below.
We have staffed this program for Spring 2024. Please check back in Summer 2024 to apply for a Fall 2024 internship.
Program Objectives
- To foster a community of scholars interested in emerging forms and methods of research and scholarship.
- To expose the next generation of faculty and researchers to rich and innovative digital tools, methods and environments that will be useful in their future work and will improve their competitiveness in the academic marketplace.
- To create an opportunity for graduate students to develop useful skills and practices to be shared with library staff and other users, and through this interaction drive the creation of innovative research- and teaching-support models within the library.
- To present alternative career paths for those holding advanced degrees, specifically as professional-level collaborators in digital scholarship based within and outside of academic departments.
- To engage students with the everyday professional practices of librarians in digital scholarship and provide experience with the operations of academic libraries, especially as they contribute to the educational goals of universities and impact teaching, learning, and research.
- To harness student expertise in technology and applied science to help the broader Columbia community to build skills around topics such as Python, R, publishing and podcasting technologies, and music technologies.
Mentoring
Each participant will be assigned to a mentor who will train the student and prepare a work plan for the project. The Libraries is committed to fostering a work environment where interns are respected and feel free to ask questions and make suggestions.
The program is open to all Columbia University graduate students. Participants must be enrolled as a student for the full academic year, from September through May.
Participants are expected to make regular contributions to the Digital Internship blog.
Interns will be paid $20.00 an hour and will work approximately twelve hours a week (or the semester equivalent thereof) during the academic year.
We have staffed this program for Spring 2024. Please check back in Summer 2024 to apply for a Fall 2024 internship.
Please contact digital-internships@library.columbia.edu with questions
Digital Music Intern
The intern works to broaden engagement with tools for digital music, musicology, music notation, and audio, in partnership with the Music Librarian and aligned with the Digital Music Lab. This may include designing and teaching/co-teaching workshops and tutorials, participating in virtual lab hours, and related individual project work. Typical scheduling is 8-10 hours/week.
Podcasting Intern
This intern works primarily on the podcasting program. This intern is primarily responsible for providing partner support (Wordpress multisite), ensuring that podcasts are being properly disseminated through aggregators (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.), and collecting program statistics. In the upcoming year, the intern will also assist with a podcast program assessment, which will involve drafting a final report with recommendations for future directions of the program.
Digital Publishing Intern
This intern works primarily on the journals program. The intern works both on maintaining and upgrading our technical infrastructure as well as educating and liaising with our editorial partners. The intern is trained to be fluent in our journal publishing software, OJS, as well as the other tools we and our partners use in the production of their journals and provides technical support as well as ongoing oversight of our publishing apparatus. The intern is also responsible for ensuring our journals are appropriately registered, cataloged, and indexed and that internal processes such as archiving, DOI minting, and analytics are completed. Lastly, the intern provides guidance to journal publishing partners, in collaboration with program staff, on editorial roles and workflows, copyright and permissions, web accessibility and other aspects of publishing practice.
Repository Metadata Intern
The intern will primarily support the work of Academic Commons, which provides global access to research and scholarship produced at Columbia University and its affiliate institutions. Duties include cataloging new digital materials for the repository, and performing maintenance on existing records to add descriptive content and improve interoperability of records with external indexes. Attention to detail is essential. Some experience with Open Refine and Python (Pandas) is desirable but not required; training will be provided, but some general knowledge of command line scripting is helpful. The intern in this position will have the opportunity to learn about metadata standards and best practices for preserving and making accessible digital scholarly objects as well as programmatic solutions for data wrangling, data cleansing and data interoperability.
Technical Pedagogy Intern
The Digital Intern will work closely with their mentor to develop curriculum for Data Club, develop and integrate community building activities and engagement as well as other Research Data Services (RDS) related initiatives. The intern will assist with research support and consultations within RDS. In addition, they will expand on their computational skill sets by assisting and working closely with their mentors on various RDS projects throughout the summer.
Digital Learning and 3D Printing Intern
The intern will be expected to support the digital learning and 3D printing programs in 2 specific areas. On a bi-weekly schedule, the intern will execute 3D prints, coordinate print pickups, maintain 3D printers as needed, and blog recent 3D prints on the CUL 3D print blog. In collaboration with the Studio at Butler, the intern will join weekly Studio meetings (Friday, 3-5pm) to support digital learning and project development as part of the Studio’s Fall and Spring programming. Experience with 3D printing tools such as Tinkercad and FlashPrint, and with hardware tools and engineering (i.e. RaspberryPi, Pine64, Arduino) are preferred but not required. The intern will be expected to adapt to needs as they arise and should have a dedicated interest in exploring digital tools, troubleshooting, as well as working in a collaborative environment. The intern can expect 8-10 hours of work per week.