Kent State Library Digital Projects

Jo Wilson

Internship: Kent State Libraries Digital Projects

“I want to be a librarian, so the opportunity to work in a library prior to starting my Master’s in Library and Information Sciences is great.

Emerging Media and Technology senior Jo Wilson, ’22, is gaining important experience working in library databases and catalogs at their internship with the Kent State Library’s digital projects during summer 2022.

Wilson has been accepted into the M.L.I.S. program at the Kent State School of Information and will begin graduate school in Fall 2022. After that, they hope to work in a library, specifically in making online catalogs more user friendly.

Wilson’s internship with the Kent State Library is specifically related to the collection of COVID-19 research in the Open Access Kent State (OAKS) repository. Wilson runs searches to find research related to COVID-19 done by Kent State employees, which are then added to the repository. This is important work, as researchers and medical professionals across the world continue to learn more about COVID-19, two years into the pandemic.

“I find it quite interesting!” Wilson says. “I want to be a librarian, so the opportunity to work in a library prior to starting my Master’s in Library and Information Sciences is great. I'm especially interested in all I'm learning about database searching and how to get the results you want.”

They said Emerging Media and Technology classes have been good preparation for this internship and graduate school, especially Interdisciplinary Projects, which taught them about client work, and Computer Applications, which familiarized them with databases and queries.