Practicum posting guidelines

Briefly describe the site, with emphasis on the following:

• Short description of clientele, services offered, etc. A link to a website may provide more detailed information such as collection details, staffing, etc., which does not need to be provided here.
• Highlights about what is special or unique about your site and/or functional unit.

Note: This section is not intended to provide an exhaustive description of the site; the emphasis will be on student activities and projects, below.

Describe the nature of the project and learning opportunities. Please include:

• Professional-level project(s) or work the student may carry out during the Practicum, e.g., information literacy instruction, conducting web usability testing, exploring implications of Web 2.0, evaluating an archival collection, designing a database, developing or improving an expertise locator system.
• Activities and tasks the student may participate in, e.g., reference, circulation, cataloguing.

See "guidelines for designing and scoping the project", below. If you have any questions about the Practicum project scope or description, please contact the SIS Academic Practicum Coordinator.

Include relevant requirements or qualifications for students, such as:

• Area of focus (e.g., Library Studies, Archival Studies, Knowledge Management, or Information and Communication Technology; or any combination of these areas)
• Courses/backgrounds in areas such as Records Management, User Experience, Cataloguing, etc.
• Language skills relevant to the project and level of speaking/writing required. Note: postings for placements at francophone or bilingual sites may be written in French.
• Travel requirements, if any.
• Any other special requirements, e.g., criminal records check, health check.

If your organization has a policy to not provide work-related references, please include a note to this effect.

A practicum project can follow one of the following three approaches:

1. Primarily project-based: involving one or more professional level projects;
2. Primarily operational-based: focusing on areas of operation and services (e.g. reference, acquisitions, administration);
3. A combination of both project and operational-based approaches.

• Project work should be suitable for a beginning professional (i.e., the majority of work should neither be routine or clerical-level, nor should work be at an expert level), clearly defined, meaningful, and manageable.
• The supervisor should be more knowledgeable than the student for most of the Practicum tasks: work performed by students is intended to be educational and to provide hands-on experience under the supervision of an information professional who can provide guidance and mentorship through the process. Please note that Practicum students are not intended to replace professional staff or consultants.
• The work should involve skills and knowledge that the student has already begun to develop through coursework but for which he/she has not yet developed a high level of expertise.

• Fieldwork is roughly equivalent to 3 weeks of full-time work. When scoping the project, build in time for orientation, meetings, research, etc., in addition to project tasks.
• Students may be interested to use work samples developed during the placement (e.g., web page, resource guide, finding aid, report excerpt, database design) in a professional portfolio. If your organization has particular requirements regarding intellecutal property, etc., please communicate any restrictions to the student and discuss options for including in a portfolio some form of evidence of work which respects the requirements of your organization.

Information studies is a human-centred domain concerned with theories, principles and practices related to the management, acquisition, organization, use, dissemination, and preservation of information and knowledge. MISt Practicum students complete information-related projects in the areas of library studies, archival studies and records management, knowledge management, and information and communication technology.

• Examples of past projects include: archival finding aid development, archival fonds processing, collection digitization, community portal enhancement, cultural heritage online exhibit development, data coordination, database design, digital collection outreach, e-learning content creation, expertise locator system enhancement, information literacy/library instruction, knowledgebase development, observational study of library traffic patterns, organizational metadata schema recommendations, organizational shared drive analysis and recommendations, records management policy development, reference services, service and program evaluation, social media strategy, taxonomy assessment and improvement, web-based resource guide development, and web usability testing, among many others.

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