Wages for Intern Work and Quarters for Keystrokes:�An Exploration of Unpaid Intern Labour in Information Work Within the Context of "Free" Digital Labour

• Main Author: Joel Blechinger
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: digital labour; intern labour; libraries and archives; Fuchs; Terranova
• Online Access: https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/f8b3a5be-5860-4ff3-b766-607abf91e6f4; https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-6nxm-1t42

Karly Wildenhaus’ “Wages for Intern Work: Denormalizing Unpaid Positions in Archives and Libraries,” from the of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies (vol. 2, no. 1, 2019), is a needed first step in challenging archival and library professionals, MLIS program faculty, and students to identify – and, in turn, to “denormalize” – the prevalence of unpaid labour across their fields. This conference presentation explores unpaid intern labour in the GLAM sector and attempts to connect it to the "free" digital labour that people perform online. I attempt to do so by using ideas from Laurel Ptak, Dallas W. Smythe, Christian Fuchs, and Tiziana Terranova.