The Value of Succession Planning in Student Internships

By Tina Liu and Sahar Kasiri-Motlagh

In thinking about the importance of succession planning when it comes to diversifying the library profession (Kumaran, 2015), we (two racialized, early-career librarians) wanted to share our experiences as successive cohorts of academic library interns under the University of Toronto’s Toronto Academic Library Internship (TALint) program. Most jobs available to library school students are short-term project-based work over a period of 3-6 months, but the TALint program differs as it is a two-year contract that allows library school students to work on long-term projects. In addition to project-based work, the length of the program allows students to cultivate long-term relationships with supervisors and develop meaningful relationships within a department. 

As TALint interns, we were both supervised by May Chan and Desmond Wong, whose foresight and thoughtful approach to mentorship and supervision have been instrumental to our success in acquiring skills and applying those skills to build careers. They have supervised three successive cohorts of TALint students. Each cohort worked on independent, yet connected, projects that addressed systemic inequities faced by Indigenous peoples within academic libraries. The first cohort ran from 2018-2020, where the interns conducted an environmental scan and developed a Toolkit on Indigenous Peoples. The second cohort ran from 2020-2022, where the primary project was a qualitative research study on the experiences of Indigenous students at the University of Toronto Libraries. The latest cohort followed up on this study from 2022-2024 with projects within the library that supported Indigenous knowledge within our collection and community.

Tina:

I was in the second cohort of interns, where my primary accomplishment was working with our research team to successfully develop, conduct, and disseminate the aforementioned study. This was my first exposure to the inner workings of academic libraries, and I am deeply fortunate to have had May and Desmond’s support—the difficulties and uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic were compounded by the increased police brutality against racialized bodies and increased anti-Asian violence. Within this difficult social context, May and Desmond’s approach to supervision encapsulates the ethics of care and their decision to situate our work as one step towards implementing social justice-based practices reinvigorated my faith in librarianship.

One takeaway from May and Desmond was how to carve out space for myself and my values within librarianship. Knowing that my work on the research study was built on the work of previous interns exposed me to a much deeper understanding of how this work would lead to future projects. Through the multi-year process of conceiving, conducting, and disseminating a research project, I’ve experienced how long-term projects support early-career librarians as contextualising the purpose of project-based work provides insight into the processes and workflows within institutions. Fundamentally, context provides meaning to student work beyond project completion. These lessons have shaped my approach to librarianship, mentorship, research, and accountability.

Sahar:

I am grateful for the opportunities and projects in the TALint program, as they not only gave me librarianship experience, but also an image of what my career could look like. The TALint program was a chance to explore and to work with others, and I lucked out by working with May and Desmond as they knew the importance of these two years. 

Building on the research Tina’s cohort produced, my position and work with the university’s First Nations Resource Centre’s collection was based on providing accurate and updated metadata for all available items. This was a necessary step in making over 2000 Indigenous items visible to library users, and an example of May and Desmond’s mentorship – advocacy and action. I learned that these projects’ expressions of equity and inclusion are unhelpful without something tangible to support it, which is why this project was meaningful to my early librarian career. 

Additionally, through May and Desmond’s mentorship within the TALint program, I saw how academic libraries can take action against outdated policies and infrastructures. The acquisition of The Eastern Door was an effort led by Desmond, and supported by other librarians who believe in this representation within an academic library. By working on the metadata creation, I was able to connect with the decades-spanning newspapers and highlight their importance. These are lived experiences from a marginalized group, a component of information that is often disregarded in academia. The Eastern Door was an opportunity to represent this knowledge within our collection and to see how advocacy can look in librarianship. 

These projects spanned over the two years of my internship, and I grew alongside them. The TALint program and my mentors were influential in how I have come to know myself as an information professional, something I cannot take for granted. 

Works Cited

Kumaran, Maha. 2015. “Succession Planning Process That Includes Visible Minority Librarians.” Library Management 36 (6-7): 434–47. doi.org/10.1108/LM-12-2014-0138.

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Tina Liu is a Cataloguing Librarian at McGill University.

Sahar Kasiri-Motlagh is an Access/Information Services Specialist at the University of Toronto. Sahar can be reached at sahar.kasiri.motlagh@utoronto.ca