Emily Kizina// Senior English Major// Gumberg Library Intern
I wholeheartedly cannot believe that the end of the semester is in two weeks! Yesterday Ted and I talked about the last day of my internship, and it was shocking to realize how soon this is coming to an end already. Last week I finally finished my LibGuide, and I must say that I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. Making a guide has been an exciting process, and at the beginning of the semester, I didn’t realize how much went in to making them. When you’re navigating through them, you don’t realize how long these take to complete. The research process was probably my favorite step out of the process because when you’re no matter if you are researching topics of interest or something unfamiliar, you can always find yourself going down the rabbit hole and into the abyss of information. Trust me; it’s happened to me a few times. Finding research on the individual playwrights that I chose was easier because Gumberg provides a list of research databases for students, and Ted directed me there. I used databases like MLA International Bibliography and ProQuest One Literature. I found most of the biographies on the playwrights from Literature Resource Center. Within this resource, I found most of my biographies from Twentieth-Century American Dramatists. However, a few playwrights whose biographies were so old the database they came from is no longer active. For my guide, in particular, we decided that we would do a gold trim around boxes and add a background filter. Both of these steps involved doing a bit of coding, which I thought was cool. Coding, in particular, is a meticulous process because all it takes is for one wrong symbol or number to throw off the whole dynamic of your page. These were the perfect touches to the finalization of my guide.
This internship has helped me stem a lot of ideas for my final projects and essays. Particularly in my Twentieth Century Drama class, we are to write a 20-30-page essay on a topic of our choosing. I initially was going to talk about my guide’s research process, but soon found myself writing on my findings of the women playwrights of the twentieth century and how fascinating they are. What sparked my interest in this topic was when I was building the list of playwrights for my guide, I found that the women were a lot harder to find information about than men. Quite frankly, these women were producing shows that were very advanced for periods like the 1910s and 20s, and although they and their shows were getting attention and hype in their time, they deserve to be a part of the discussion in the modern-day as well.
In my last weeks, I will be helping Ted work on the Native American LibGuide and continue fixing the list of broken links from the beginning of the semester. This internship so far has been very fulfilling to me, and I’ve learned so much. I’m also going to include the link to my guide; please click on it, check it out and let me know what you think!
Building Bridges 