Emily Kizina // Senior English Major // Gumberg Library Intern
I am in complete and utter shock that my final fall midterms week and has come and gone already. Time is continuously fleeting, and my list of assignments is rapidly growing, but my internship has been my sweet relief away from the semester’s stress. In the past two weeks, I have started building my guide from scratch. In my previous post I talked about how I was going to make my guide about Pittsburgh Playwrights, but I wasn’t finding enough resources to make a successful and useful guide. Ted and I decided to broaden the subject and so my guide has now changed and will be titled: Twentieth-Century American Playwrights. I have had no trouble finding information and there are so many vital playwrights from the twentieth century that deserve to be recognized, but Mr. Bergfelt and I decided to narrow the list down to twenty-four household names. We have the same amount of men and women, and we’ve included names like Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Lillian Hellman, and more. Yesterday, I found headshots of all of these famous playwrights. Searching for photos of them was fun, and allowed me to see what these writers looked like in their prime writing years, and other images showed them in their later years, long after their success has dissolved. Mr. Bergfelt has a trimming tool to make all the photos one size, which allows all of the pictures to look clean-cut and orderly. We do a Gumberg catalog search for “all books by” and “all books about,” so I spent most of my time yesterday attaching those links. Tomorrow, I will begin finding biographies and articles about these people. This process has been enjoyable because, as I am reading some of these monumental pieces of art, I also am learning about these writer’s lives and essentially what’s shaped them to write this way. I’m understanding the context of the world around them when they wrote it, and to me, that then makes reading these shows more meaningful. The intertwining of my classes, my internship, and my job have been an excellent way to see multiple perspectives at different education levels.
As I’ve stated before, a perk of landing this internship was that I already was familiar with the library because I have worked at the Curriculum Center for the last three years. The Curriculum Center is a resource room for any person or people that are working with children. There are puppets, curriculum kits, literature kits, chapter books, educational games, etc. Mr. Bergfelt has also mentioned that the Curriculum Center library guide is one of the most clicked on guides and one of the most heavily used guides that the library has. The room has heavy traffic as far as how much material comes in and out. Still, since the coronavirus started, we’ve had to reduce the room’s traffic, and online resources have become helpful. My boss at the Curriculum Center, Danielle Henzler, was so kind as to ask me if I wanted to create a Library Guide for the Curriculum Center. Many important events are coming up, but I chose to showcase Voting and all the room’s resources on the subject (which there are a ton.) I’ll share the link to the guide once I’ve finished it, but I’ve included a picture of some of the books that will be on the voting guide!
Building Bridges 