RLI 286  5 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC 2015 Symposium brings leaders and potential leaders together for discussion, networking, and professional development. Leaders from CEP partner libraries attend the symposium, meeting the students who will join their libraries for summer internships, when their staff will be able to highlight the opportunities for librarians in research libraries to these interns who reflect the diversity found in the student population of ARL universities. Following decades of experience with its own Associate Fellowship Program, NLM has participated as a partner library during the six years to date of CEP from 2009 through 2015. NLM hosted 14 fellows in a variety of settings such as the History of Medicine, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Office, Specialized Information Services, Reference and Web Services, Exhibits, and Preservation. The internship projects ranged from market research and the creation of an outreach plan for online exhibitions, to research supporting a traveling exhibition on Native Hawaiian healing, to documentation for NLM’s participation in the Medical Heritage Library, to analysis of online customer service satisfaction index data. NLM also complemented the CEP projects with professional development activities during the fellowship, following an 80/20 rule of 80% project time and 20% professional development time. In the 20% of professional development time, the students met with senior leadership and participated in a new managers’ discussion—new managers at NLM, coming from academe or other government agencies, shared with the students what new managers can expect, what surprises they encountered, and what kinds of work had to be given up in becoming a manager. The CEP fellows also participated in a Résumé Review, where hiring managers reviewed the students’ résumés and offered tips for successful federal or industry résumés and academic curricula vitae. The students took field trips in Washington, DC, to the ARL offices, the Government Printing Office, and the Library of Congress. At the Library of Congress they participated in a discussion of what makes a successful exhibit and followed that with trips to visit exhibits at museums in the area. The students also had an opportunity to extend their peer network by attending a new librarians’ discussion with NLM staff who were recent library science graduates. Each CEP fellow at NLM was assigned a mentor from a division other than the one in which the student was working to provide a safe space for discussion and voicing any concerns. The 14 ARL CEP fellows who interned at NLM are now a cohort of alumni participants and many mentors keep in touch with their fellows. NLM recently contacted the fellows to find out where they are now. All of the NLM ARL CEP fellows were employed, or still in school one is now a program analyst at the Institute of Museum and Library Services. NLM uses their post-internship stories to celebrate the completion of the program and share their outcomes at a meeting of all Library Operations staff, bringing to the staff’s attention the mentorship, supervision, and inclusion of the fellows in NLM work life. NLM, MLA, and ALA’s Spectrum Scholarship Program Prior to the ARL CEP fellows program, NLM actively engaged in the support of library science students through annual sponsorship of two of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Spectrum Scholars, in partnership with the Medical Library Association (MLA). This support extended efforts NLM already
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