Hi everyone, my name is Amy and I am one of the 2021 Open Content Curator Interns.  I have just finished my 4^th year of an Astrophysics degree and am staying on at the University to complete my masters next year. The Open Content Curator Interns work really hard every year to publish brand new OERs on the Open.Ed website and the University of Edinburgh Open.Ed TES ‘store’.  This is something I am very excited to get stuck in to as I took part in the Geoscience Outreach & Engagement course this year. This gave me the opportunity to create my own bespoke resource which will hopefully be published on the website by the end of the summer. This is also one of the main reasons that I applied for the role and I can’t wait to see what the rest of my cohort produced this year!

To successfully publish the great resources created by my peers, we have made a concerted effort in our first week to learn about copyright and licensing. This is in order to make sure the intellectual property of the authors is protected but also to make sure the resources are accessible to the largest number of people possible when they are published. I have really enjoyed the training we’ve been doing so far and feel like I’ve learned a lot already! Everyone we work with is very supportive, welcoming any questions we have, and places great value in work-life balance which I really appreciate after a long and arduous year of learning during a pandemic.

I feel like I am settling in nicely and have had a few opportunities to get to know the other interns who are working in ISG over the summer which has been so much fun! It’s nice to know that, while you might be working in a small team, there are lots of other interns around to turn to for help and support. Even though we are working remotely, we’ve still had opportunities to connect with each other which is so incredible and demonstrates how well we have adapted to this new way of working and socialising!

Over the next few weeks, I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into the projects that we’re going to be working on and learning more about the copyright and licensing necessary to make as many of these amazing projects available to everyone. I really hope you’ll enjoy our final results!