The Friends of the Golda Meir Library, for the third consecutive year, have funded the library internship of a UWM School of Information Studies graduate student. This past spring semester, the internship was awarded to Stephanie Surach, who served in the Libraries’ Collection and Resource Management (CRM) Division.
The internship was “an amazing opportunity,” Stephanie says, that allowed her “to develop valuable skills and experiences, as well as the confidence to succeed as an academic librarian after graduation.”
Stephanie came to UWM’s MLIS program from New York City, where she had been employed as a creative project manager in a communications marketing firm. She holds a BA in both anthropology and comparative literature from the University of Michigan, an L3 in cinema and audiovisual studies from the L’Institut Européen de Cinéma et d’Audiovisuel in France, and a project management certificate from Duke University.
“The decision to leave my career in New York and move half-way across the country to earn my MLIS was a difficult one, but ultimately one of the best and most rewarding choices I have made,” she says, due in part to opportunities like the Friends internship.
As a CRM intern, Stephanie assisted with resource relocation issues in anticipation of the Archives move to the third floor. She also managed all book donations, sorting and sifting the books, diverting valuable books to the Libraries’ general or distinctive collections, and sending unneeded volumes to an online bookseller (which returns $9000 annually to the collection budget).
One of the largest gifts she worked on was a 5,000 volume donation from UW-Madison Professor Emeritus Jan Vansina that covered world history; African history, archeology, and ethnography; and African languages. “It was great to use my background in anthropology to go through that collection,” she says.
Stephanie will graduate from UWM in December 2019.