One of the requirements for my MLIS program is an internship or thesis paper. I have decided to do an internship anticipating that real life experience may serve me better in the long run than yet another research paper. Details below.

Within the past few years, the academic library I am working in has purchased a digital camera and started documenting special events held within the library. These images depict yearly, quarterly, and one-time library events including open houses, guest visits, staff activities, faculty speaking engagements, etc. The library has chosen to take a step in the right direction by documenting these events visually, however no one has ever been tasked with organizing the images. The result is over two thousand unnamed, unorganized images in multiple folders on the library server.

I have been brought on to create an organized, web-based collection of these photographs. When completed, the existing collection will be organized, searchable (using keywords, tagging & metadata), and accompanied by a documentation guide for future image additions.

I have been researching possible open source programs to facilitate this collection since May 2007 and recently have been approved by the Library Director to work with an add-on for Drupal (the CMS system we are currently migrating to) for an open source solution called Gallery.

Last week we finally got the software installed, so now I am working on importing all of the images and keyword tagging them. There are still a lot of images to evaluate (whether or not they should be included in the collection) and I have to work on the documentation guide. My internship technically ends in mid-December, but I am assuming that it won’t be 100% complete and the library will allow me to continue working on the project.