Mellon Library Recruitment Grant

LITS Annual Report 2004-2005

2004/2005 was the second year of a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation focused on recruiting undergraduates from underrepresented groups to the library profession. (A full description of the program may be found at here. Mount Holyoke participates in the grant with Oberlin, Occidental, Swarthmore and Wellesley Colleges, and the Atlanta University Center. Our participation in 04/05 included the following:
Postbac Library Associate. Mount Holyoke hosted oumarou-hamadou, Oberlin ’04. Born in Cameroon, oumarou had a diverse career path before attending Oberlin College. His interest in libraries related to his plans to establish a school for AIDS orphans in his home village. Some highlights of oumarou’s projects included:

• Content DM – scanned images for inclusion in image database for class
• RIS Faculty Handbook – collected information from LITS website for inclusion in handbook
• Weeding – participated in summer weeding project and identified books to be sent to Cameroon
• Shadowing – visited various library departments; met with and shadowed librarians and staff including reference desk and library instruction sessions
• Center for Global Initiatives – developing collaborative projects including possibly sending MHC interns to Cameroon
• Workshops – attended Dreamweaver training
• Site Visits – joined trips to other college libraries
• Electronic Journal Cataloging – updated list of current holdings at MHC with information displayed on vendor websites
• Archives – processed collection of correspondence in French between an MHC alumna and a friend
• TEI – coding French poetry in XML
• Mellon – assist with Open Access Information Sessions
  · WMRLS – attended business meeting
• Simmons – visited session of Literacy class
• ALA – attended ALA Midwinter for a Mellon Associate retreat

Broad based programming. The topic for the Fall 2004 sessions was Open Access Publishing. The sessions included several short videos, a “price is right” game and discussion. We held 4 sessions, with a total of 25 attendees.

Interns. Thanks to assistance from the Career Development Center, we received a tremendous response to our posting for Spring interns, receiving 31 applications for 3 slots:

White 17
Blank 6
Asian 3
Asian American 2
African 1
African American 1
Latina 1
TOTAL 31

Spring 2005 Interns:

• Nga Bui ’06, Economics (Vietnamese)
• Yaminette Diaz ’06, Anthropology and Psychology (Puerto Rican)
• Crystal Johnson ’05, Psychology and French (African American)

In addition to the “official” interns, two students participated in the curriculum and attended a field trip to the Five College Library Depository.
The interns completed the following projects:

• Nga Bui: Information Fluency student focus group
• Yaminette Diaz: conducted survey on “24 hours” opening in LITS during exams
• Crystal Johnson: surveyed Mount Holyoke Seminary Textbook Collection

Summer internships. We were very pleased that two of our Spring interns, Yaminette and Crystal, were interesting in continuing their internships over the summer. Yaminette worked in Research and Instructional Support; Crystal worked with Archives and Special Collections.

Other news. Our wonderful coordinator of 2 years, Ellen Carey, has accepted a fulltime position in the library at Greenfield Community College. As of this writing, we are looking for ways to fill the coordinator position for the final year of the grant.
The topic for the programming this Fall will be “Google and Libraries.” This year’s retreat may again be held at ALA Midwinter, this year in San Antonio.

Prepared by:
Kathleen Norton
July 2005