The Newberry Library is offering two paid internships for advanced undergraduates in the liberal arts. This opportunity will allow interns to explore potential careers in library and information science, publishing, and journalism. During the summer of 2008, interns will work 35 hours/week with senior Newberry staff members on one of the projects listed below. The start date for interns is flexible, but would occur after mid-June. The internships last ten weeks and are open to students who will be between their junior and senior years in the summer of 2008 (i.e. expected graduation date must be December or May, 2009). The stipend is $2,500, with up to $2,500 in reimbursable housing costs.
This program has been funded by a grant from the James S. Kemper Foundation, Chicago, Illinois.
HOW TO APPLY:
Applicants should submit their packets electronically. If this presents a problem for you, please call the Office of Research and Education at (312) 255-3666 to make other arrangements.
To apply, please email the following documents as attachments to research@newberry.org:
1) A cover sheet (Download the cover sheet here and fill in the form fields using Microsoft Word.)
2) A cover letter specifying your career goals and project preferences
3) A resumé
Please call 312.255.3666 or e-mail with any questions
Kemper Internships * Research and Education * 60 West Walton Street * Chicago, IL 60610
2008 INTERNSHIPS:
MIDWEST MODERN MANUSCRIPTS INTERN
Interns will assist in processing the Midwest Manuscripts collections, introducing them to the worlds of journalism, dance, literary production, and archival and library science. This collection comprises more than 500 collections of personal papers and the records of organizations documenting the history and culture of Chicago and the Midwest. Many of these collections need to be arranged, preserved, housed, and described to current professional standards. The intern will process collections, learning the principles of arrangement and preservation, and creating collection-level inventories. Good for students with a special interest and coursework in journalism, dance, American history, or American literature.
RARE BOOK INTERN
The Department of Collection Development will employ interns with some knowledge of Latin to work with the Newberry's outstanding collection of incunables (books printed before 1501). Interns will record (following a formal paradigm) copy-specific features including illuminations, bindings, manuscript fragments used in bindings, and manuscript annotations of various sorts ranging from rubrication and reader's notes to textual emendations and leaf numberings. Interns will focus either on a specific author (Terence, Persius and Livy for example) or a specific printer or city (Venice for example). This internship offers an opportunity to gain hands-on experience for a student with interests in history, art history, or classical or modern languages.
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS INTERN
The intern will work on two projects within the Newberry’s Department of Special Collections. For the first project, the intern will assist the map cataloger in classifying and labeling the Library’s collection of automobile road maps. This collection includes gas station maps, official state highway maps, and automobile club maps produced between the 1930s and the 1990s by firms such as Rand McNally, Gousha, General Drafting, and AAA. For the second project, the intern will work with the curator of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing to maintain the collection in the stacks. The Wing collection encompasses a wide variety of materials related to printing, book arts, and the history of the book; the job involves lifting some oversized, dusty volumes. This internship would be appropriate for students with interests in American and/or European history, geography, cartography, or art history.
ABOUT THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY
One of the world's leading independent research and rare book libraries, the Newberry's collections embrace the history and literature of the civilizations of Western Europe and the Americas from the Middle Ages down to the end of the Napoleonic Era in Europe, to the revolutionary period in Latin America, and through World War I in North America and Britain. For many fields, including Chicago history and Modern Manuscripts, there are also rich sources for the 20th century. The collection numbers some 1.5 million books, five million manuscript pages, and 500,000 historic maps. Find out more here.