March 20, 2009 -- For students, spring break is a tradition that usually involves sunshine and sleeping in. But two graduate students from the University of Michigan, School of Information spent their week interning with NDIIPP as part of the school’s Alternative Spring Break Program.
Barton and Vermaaten of the University of Michigan School of Information.
Dawn Barton and Sally Vermaaten, along with 13 other students, came to the Library of Congress to gain valuable, real-world experience as information professionals.
Barton and Vermaaten were able to meet with many staff members who are working on digital preservation projects, including Web Capture processes and the preservation metadata dictionary PREMIS. "It was fascinating to see how the departments divide up responsibility and work together to try to achieve the broad goal of better digital preservation inside and outside the Library of Congress," said Vermaaten.
"Meeting such a wide variety of people allowed me the opportunity to learn about aspects of digital preservation that I had little or no exposure to previous to this experience," Barton added. "I felt like we had a great hands-on opportunity."
The students also worked with the NDIIPP communications team and made recommendations for improving the digitalpreservation.gov Web site. They contributed fresh insight to the team while also learning more about the challenges of digital preservation and how NDIIPP is meeting those challenges.
The week flew by just as any spring break does, but an enriching time was had by all.
