Shift #1 (1.25 hrs) - 1st Quarter Meeting

Shift #1 - 1st Quarter Meeting (Overview & Introduction to Internship)

Monday, May 20, 2024 | 12-1:15 pm CST/1-2:15 pm EST (1.25 hours)

Details

Michelle Hurt, student/intern

Jennifer Gonzalez, practicum supervisor

My practicum this summer is the Law Library of Congress's Creative Digital Publications Summer Remote Program. We had an exciting start with a large group virtual meeting, hosted by the program's supervisor Jennifer Gonzalez. Jennifer is a senior legal information specialist, the head of the Digital Resources Division, and the webmaster for the Law Library of Congress website. Ahead of the meeting, Jennifer sent the Summer Enrichment Schedule to all the interns in the program. During the meeting, she went over how the internship will be conducted: there are four quarters, three weeks each, beginning on May 20 and ending August 9. She explained the internship's project structure, which includes different meetings we are encouraged to participate in:

• Required large meetings are exclusive to the internship program. (These are OK to miss, but we will have to notify Jennifer that we missed the meeting in our check-in emails we send at the end of each week.) Though there are a couple of weeks where there are no required large group meetings, most weeks have at least one meeting we are required to attend. Once every three weeks, we will have an introduction meeting about the quarter ahead.
• Required small group meetings are with our small group cohort. All the interns were split up into smaller groups and assigned a mentor. These happen once every quarter. 
• Required individual meetings with our supervisor. 1-2 times per quarter, every intern meets with Jennifer to go over the intern's topic idea and research progress.
• Optional meetings are webinars and presentations conducted by various staff from the Internships and Fellowships Program of the Library of Congress and the Legal Research Institute of the Law Library of Congress.

The main focus of this internship is to conduct research of the Law Library's collections and to write 1-2 blog posts for In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library. There is no guarantee that our blog post will be published, but it will still be a great exercise of conducting research and learning about the many digital collections available to the public. The goal of having our blog post published is to promote the Law Library's collections. Our blog post will point to a topic related to a collection in the Law Library, but it will not be a legal analysis. It should be neutral in tone so that the public can understand what the Law Library's collections are. 

This is a screenshot of the internship Summer Enrichment Schedule. Jennifer color-coded every meeting to help us keep track of required meetings and optional meetings.

Admittedly, I felt a little nervous to start this internship prior to the meeting (especially since I have no law background, save for the little I know as a citizen) but after hearing Jennifer go over our schedule and what our job entails as interns, I feel a whole lot better. My plan is to take each week as it comes and to go into this summer with fresh eyes as I learn about U.S., foreign, comparative, and international law.