The Library and Archives at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is happy to announce that we have paid, remote/hybrid internship opportunities for summer 2023.  

The projects (listed below) will each last 10 weeks from June 12-August 18, and we are part of the DigITs Summer Internship Program (the division through which the Library and Archives reports). For more information about compensation and other details, please see the MSK Careers Job Post. 

Application deadline: February 3, 2023  

Those interested in applying for an internship must apply through this MSK Careers Job Post (which is a general application for the DigITs Summer Internship Program). 

If you are interested in this opportunity, we encourage you to apply as soon as possible. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Anthony Dellureficio (for the Research Data Management project) or Sheridan Sayles (for the Archives project).  

 

Archival Project: 

The Archives at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Library house records from 1885 to present that document the administrative and research history of Memorial Sloan Kettering and its predecessors. The Archives at MSK is in the midst of a transformation period; the Library hired its first full-time archivist in June of 2022 and is now focusing on moving from a purely closed access model to making the collections increasingly available online. In January of this year, the Archives launched its first instance of ArchivesSpace and is moving forward through increasing description of existing collections, processing new collections, and beginning to build digitization infrastructure. 

Archival projects for Summer 2023 will build on the existing goals of the department by focusing on topics of arrangement and description, as determined in conjunction with the archivist and candidate. Types of projects can include:  

• processing of a mid-size collection 

• creation of name and subject authority files 

• creation of digital assets 

 

Research Data Management Project: 

This project will center around the questions: 

• What differences, commonalities, and standards exist between metadata structures of various FAIR repositories? 

• Can workflows be developed to enhance metadata sharing from repositories to institutional discovery platforms?  

 

In March 2020, the Library launched the MSK Data Catalog, a searchable and browsable online collection of records describing the contents of datasets and providing access instructions for those wishing to explore the data for their own research. The catalog records consist of rich metadata conforming to schema.org standards, as well as utilizing controlled vocabularies, such as NLM medical subject headings (MeSH) and the MSK's Oncotree cancer taxonomy. You can read more about the project here: https://datacatalog.mskcc.org/about. 

The records in our catalog primarily come from public, FAIR compliant repositories (such as cBioPortal, Gene Expression Omnibus, Dryad, Harvard Dataverse, figShare, Zenodo, etc) and complement our institutional publications database, Synapse, a public-facing resource tracking the intellectual output of MSK researchers. 

The intern in this project will:  

• Prepare a description by repository of a search strategy to discover deposits affiliated with MSK (this strategy will be shared publicly for adoption by other institutions), 

• Document workflows and procedures for exporting metadata from these repositories, 

• Document workflows and procedures for massaging exported metadata records and ingesting them into our data catalog (with annotations to help replication of these procedures), 

• Create new catalog records for MSK generated datasets in the publicly accessible repositories mentioned above. 

Apply online here