The Ask A Librarian Internship Program is excited to welcome the Spring 2026 cohort to Columbia University Libraries. The Ask A Librarian Internship provides Library and Information Science students with paid, hands-on experience in academic librarianship. Interns receive training and support from a librarian supervisor at Columbia in order to assist users through the Ask A Librarian chat service. Additionally, interns work in collaboration with their supervisor to conduct a project. Please join us in welcoming Ana, Joseph, and Roxy!
Ana Espinoza (she/her) is a student in the MLS program at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). She is also an Information Assistant at the Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library at Queens College. Before deciding to pursue librarianship, she was an editor at Doubleday, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and, more recently, an English teacher at a secondary school in Madrid, Spain. She received her BA in English literature from Columbia University, where she also concentrated in Latin American and Caribbean studies and worked as a Library Assistant at Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. She is excited to develop her virtual reference skills and support Columbia students as an Ask A Librarian intern this semester. Outside of her work and studies, she enjoys reading, knitting, junk journaling, and hiking.
Joseph A. Torres-González (he/him/his/él) is a PhD candidate (Spring 2026) in anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds a Master’s degree in anthropology and Latin American studies from the University at Albany, SUNY, and a Master’s degree in anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also a non-matriculated student in the University of Puerto Rico Library & Information Sciences Program.
Joseph has been a Junior Fellow (2021) and later appointed as Caribbean Studies Reference Librarian (2023-2025) at the Library of Congress. He participated in the School of Latin American Development Studies at the United Nations Commission for Latin America & the Caribbean (ECLAC), in Santiago, Chile. He has received various fellowships for pedagogical collaboration, archival research, and for development in the digital humanities and social sciences, such as an Andrew W. Mellon Transformative Learning in the Humanities (TLH) Faculty Fellowship, along with being a Co-Principal Investigator for a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/CUNY BRESI (Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative) to design a fully-online Certificate in Latino Studies program at Lehman College, CUNY. Joseph currently teaches as an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Latin American & Latino Studies at Lehman College, CUNY, and at the Department of Anthropology, Brooklyn College, CUNY.
Roxy Rico is a Miami native who has found happiness in ditching the Florida highways for New York’s subway. When she’s not working on her MLS/MA degree at Queens College, she works with first through third grades as an assistant teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights. She loves to cook and browse the public domain. She looks forward to answering all of your burning questions over at the Ask A Librarian chat.
Do you have questions about the Ask A Librarian Internship? Please contact AskALibrarianInternship@library.columbia.edu for more information.