Preface by Kelley Rae Unger, Children's Librarian, Peabody Institute Library, Peabody When Gordon College student Bethany Antos began her internship at the Peabody Institute Library, she was familiar with archival work but had never experienced the buzzing energy of work in a lively Children's Room. She had never experienced first-hand the quiz show array of questions at a public library's Reference Desk and she never knew where librarians found out about the vast numbers of titles they ordered to fill their shelves. Now, just one semester later, Bethany is familiar with all of these things and more. When Bethany came to her initial interview at the Peabody Institute Library with Susan Babb, she made it clear that she wanted to know about everything. Her primary interest was Children's Services, but she wanted experience in Reference and Adult Services as well. During her internship, Bethany helped with children's programs, learned about basic circulation procedures, weeded parts of the collection, helped out at Reference, made displays and generally made herself open to anything else we might ask her to do. Bethany was a huge help to all of the departments in which she worked. Bethany is about to graduate from Gordon and head home to New York. We will miss her fresh perspective and enthusiasm, but know she will put them to good use in her future library jobs! A big "thank you" to Bethany for all of her hard work, and thank you to Susan for matching us up!

A Wild Ride of Discovery and Adventure
at the Peabody Institute Library, Peabody!
by Bethany Antos

Energy. This was the first thing I sensed upon entering the Children's Room of the Peabody Institute Library on January 13th of this year. I came as a senior from Gordon College with a double major in History and Communications with room for a few flexible credits and a complete ignorance of library matters. Sure, I had worked as an intern the past six summers at an archive center, but as was frequently quoted to me: "Archivists are not librarians!" I quickly learned through my internship that the opposite was true - librarians are most definitely not archivists! I was in for a wild ride of discovery and adventure at the Peabody Institute Library!

Why did I want to work in a library? Good question! Libraries have always fascinated me - I used to (and still do, actually!) spend hour upon hour wandering around the shelves; the first place I go when I arrive home for a vacation is my local town library - so it was a natural choice to want to do an internship in one. There was this problem, though: what on earth happened in a library? Sure, you check out books, movies, and other stuff, but is there really anything else?

Apparently, there is! I quickly discovered this as Kelley Rae Unger, my on-site supervisor in the Children's Room, took me on a tour of the library and showed me the three main areas I would be working and observing: the Children's Room, Adult Services, and Reference. The majority of my time, I spent in Children's, and for two hours each week, I worked in Adult Services and Reference. This schedule gave me a taste of different areas of the library, yet allowed me to focus most of my work in the Children's Room, which was the area in which I was truly interested.

So, what did I really do at the library? I could take the easy way out, and say that I worked on "a lot of stuff," but I simply can't - I did so many cool and fun things! When I worked in Adult Services, I was able to do a wide variety of activities: weeding both the fiction and non-fiction collections, shelving books, ordering books and CDs, collection development activities, developing monthly book displays, and I even made reminder phone calls for an upcoming program (overcoming my intense fear of phone calls while at it!). When in Reference, I was able to gain my bearings in the library's collections by retrieving materials for NOBLE loans, and I was privileged enough to observe many a Reference question and learn just how Reference librarians really manage to "know everything"!

My times in the Children's Room were most definitely the most stressful (I'm a worrier and therefore stress about everything, whether I need to or not!) but also the most beneficial - as I mentioned before, the Children's Room, I felt, possessed incredible amounts of energy. This may have been aided by the amazing remodeling job that had been completed approximately two days before I began my internship, but I would venture to say that most of the energy was provided by the Children's librarians and the young patrons themselves. Whether they were running into the room with cheeks red from the cold, huffing and puffing, asking breathlessly if they could go on a computer, shyly sidling up to the desk to ask where they could find a book about Thomas Edison or proudly handing over their very own library card to take out their very own books, their excitement was entirely tangible and quickly spread to the rest of the staff.

For me, while in the Children's Room, even simple "busywork" tasks became exciting and beneficial - cutting out tree trunks for a story time craft, straightening the picture book and non-fiction book shelves, even checking in returned books was something to do that I may not have even realized needed to be done by a librarian. While at the Peabody Institute Library, I weeded through the board books, audio CDs, as well as the picture book collections, which was an amazing (yet heart-wrenching) exercise in familiarizing me with the Children Room's collections.

While one article could not possibly contain what I learned at the Peabody Institute Library this past semester, it hopefully can contain my sentiments that my internship was one of the best experiences of my college career. My time there was spent learning that libraries are some of the busiest places I can imagine - they are constantly bustling with patrons, materials, and ideas! I loved it! Special thanks to Susan Babb for finding this internship opportunity, and most especially the staff at the Peabody Institute Library who tried their hardest to make me feel welcome and comfortable (despite the fact that I asked their names about twenty times over!). Working as an intern at the Peabody Institute Library solidified the idea in my mind that my degree in Library Science is a necessary step in my schooling (after I start paying off a few of those dang student loans accrued over the past four years, of course!). Above all, I will never forget the energy of the Children's Room. I have had a wonderful last semester at Gordon College, due in a large part to my internship, and I wouldn't trade this experience for anything in the world!