Home >  Library Opportunities

Friends of the National Park Service Libraries

To help us build our volunteer and internship programs and develop partnership opportunities, we are seeking an individual to head up a new Friends of the NPS Libraries Group (a non-profit organization). This person would work with, and receive support from, the NPS Library Program Manager and a park librarian with extensive friends' group experience. See contact information below.

The ideal candidate would be an outgoing person with a corporate and/or academic background, superior communication and motivational skills, a home base in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an interest in traveling to the national parks (including the free time to do so). We would love to hear from you if you have an interest in taking on this role, or if you are interested in joining the Friends of the National Park Service Libraries in another capacity.

amalin_ferguson@nps.gov
david_hull@nps.gov

Adopt-a-Park-Library

This is a new initiative that is still in the formulation and outreach stages. We are seeking professors of library school cataloging classes who would like to develop a longterm partnership with us. Specifically, we invite every library school to adopt the library of a park located in the same state or in another state, but having a collection scope intersecting with that of the library school's parent organization.

Most of our parks do not have the benefit of having a professional librarian or library technician on staff. Therefore, many park libraries have only rudimentary card catalogs or none at all. Because they have no electronic records to contribute to the NPS Voyager Library Catalog on the Web, they are not able to take advantage of this state-of-the-art finding aid for their collections. The result is that park staff and visiting researchers have a hard time knowing just what the park has in the way of information resources, much of which is critical to the resources managed and "interpreted" (to the public) by park staff.

The "adoptive parent" (i.e., the library school cataloging class) would perform copy cataloging to obtain electronic records matching the park library's holdings, based on xeroxed title pages and versos (annotated with holdings information), to be supplied by the park. The park would then be responsible for maintenance cataloging, and would be given ProCite v.5 (by the NPS Library Program Office), which comes with a built-in Z39.50 client and also supports production of library label sets, shelf lists (for inventory) and new book lists. The park's electronic catalog records would be uploaded to NPS Voyager (the NPS union library catalog), enabling wide access to the park library collection via the Web.

If you are a library school cataloging professor or a library school student and you are interested in helping us get this initiative off the ground with your program, please contact us (email provided below). In addition, consider that the development of a working model for a prototype "Adopt-a-Park-Library" partnership would make an excellent project for an independent study.

amalin_ferguson@nps.gov

Internships, VIPs (Volunteers in Parks), Paid Positions

Most of the national park library managers have no professional library training and juggle library responsibilities with many other duties. If you are interested in working for a park library (on either a project or a longterm basis), please contact one of the following NPS librarians, below, according to your area of interest. To determine search for parks by name, state or subject, go back to our homepage and click the 'park' button on the upper right hand corner.

As parks contact us with specific library projects, we will post them to the general VIP page on ParkNet, the National Park Service website (http://www.nps.gov/volunteer/). We can also devise a project suited to your interests and abilities and match you up with a park. Whether you propose a project or respond to a posting, we will provide you with necessary guidance and technical support.

Internship positions for library school students will be limited to those sites with fulltime, professional librarians on staff. Work-Study positions can sometimes be arranged, according to proximity of colleges or universities to NPS units and availability of funding. However, these opportunities will be limited to NPS sites with fulltime, professional library staff. As vacancies or new positions for Library Technicians and Librarians occur, job announcements will be posted to USAJOBS (http://www.usajobs.opm.gov/).

Pacific-West Region:
California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington

Nancy Hori, Head Librarian
National Park Service
Columbia-Cascades System Support Office
909 First Avenue
Seattle, WA 981040-1060
(206) 220-4154 (voice)
nancy_hori@nps.gov

Intermountain West Region:
Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, Utah

Carol Simpson, Librarian
National Park Service
Denver Service Center
12795 West Alameda Parkway
Lakewood, CO 80228
(303) 969-2534 (voice)
(303) 969-2557 (fax)
carol_simpson@nps.gov

Northeast Region:
Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia,

David Nathanson
Office of Reference Services
National Park Service
Harpers Ferry Center
Harpers Ferry, WV
(304) 535-6262 (voice)
(304) 535-6492 (fax)
david_nathanson@nps.gov

All Other Regions:
Alaska, Midwest, Southeast

Amalin Ferguson
Library Program Manager
National Park Service
c/o San Francisco Maritime Nat'l Hist Park
Lower Ft. Mason, Bldg. E, 2nd floor
San Francisco, CA 94123
(510) 758-3975 (hm ofc)
amalin_ferguson@nps.gov