An Internship at the Ruth Lilly Special Collections & Archives, IUPUI https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers Just another IU Blogs Sites site Tue, 10 Dec 2019 20:27:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 An Archives internship: final thoughts https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/an-archives-internship-final-thoughts/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/an-archives-internship-final-thoughts/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 20:27:24 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=27 Read more »]]> Overall, my internship experience was an overwhelmingly positive one. Although I was a little nervous about all of the commute time between Bloomington and Indianapolis, I found the drives actually went by relatively quickly (it helped that I often left before or after the normal 4-5:30pm rush hour traffic hit). I also was able to stay with friends in Indy one night every week, which allowed me to sleep a little more and get some work done at their house rather than driving home and back up to Indy within a span of fewer than 12 hours. The internship itself was a really positive learning experience and I enjoyed getting to know Angela, Denise, and the rest of the staff in the Archives – everyone was so friendly and was always willing to offer help (and sweets!). Although the digital inventory took longer than I had expected to create, it was a worthwhile experience and gave me some insight into the research and process that has to happen in order to make a convincing case for additional funding.

I would highly recommend an internship at the Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives up at IUPUI to other library students in the future – my supervisors, Angela and Denise, went above and beyond to make me feel supported and the projects that I worked on were all interesting. If I could do it over, I might have tried to rearrange my schedule a bit to observe a few more instruction sessions and see how Angela, Denise, and other librarians teach classes. However, I feel like I gained a lot of experience in a short period of time and was happy that everything went so well this semester.

As far as logistics go, I felt that 120 hours was a reasonable requirement for the internship – nearing the end, I even wished I could complete a few more hours just to put the finishing touches on a couple of projects! For students in the future who might want to do an internship here and are nervous about the frequent commute, I would recommend seeing if there’s anyone you could stay with one or two nights every week – I stayed with some friends in Indy on Monday nights (since I worked until 6pm on Mondays and went back in at 7:30 on Tuesday mornings) and that really helped me feel more well-rested and enthusiastic about the work day. I would also recommend finding a good balance between professional and functional attire – I dressed pretty nicely the first few days but quickly realized that in order to climb step ladders, push carts, carry boxes, and and power-walk the stacks to find materials, I would need to wear sturdier shoes (like sneakers) so I wasn’t constantly tripping over myself. I got into the habit of wearing a nice top or sweater with jeans and sneakers so that I could move freely while still looking work-appropriate. I really hope that more students choose to make a connection with the Archives and do their internships there, as it was a great experience for me! I’m incredibly happy to be returning there in the spring for a few hours every week to assist with processing some manuscript collections and can’t wait to work with everyone again!

 

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Last days of the internship https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/last-days-of-the-internship/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/last-days-of-the-internship/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 20:25:23 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=25 Read more »]]> My last few days of the internship were in November and consisted mostly of grant-writing and final edits to the digital inventory, as well as a small break for a holiday party upstairs with some of my co-workers. To be honest, I really felt like the 120 hours had flown by and I was feeling kind of bummed to be leaving, although I had already spoken to Angela and Denise about the possibility of volunteering or working back there in the future. However, the last two weeks was filled with lots of good things, like a short break to visit the holiday party for library staff upstairs and eat some treats and an office-wide discussion of Roomba-like devices.

On the final day of my internship, Denise was kind enough to take me out for a little treat and we had our performance evaluation over milkshakes. After the short eval, we chatted about our experience in the library and archives world and Denise answered a lot my questions and was able to show me some valuable resources for continuing education post-graduation. We also talked a bit about the internship process at IUB, as Denise is working on the requirements for the library internship at IUPUI and wanted to see how other programs were structuring theirs. After our milkshakes, we headed back to the Archives and spent some time chatting with colleagues and finishing up work. It was a bittersweet feeling to walk out the University Library doors into the chilly evening air after I finished my last shift, as I was excited to not have to commute so much but sad that the whole process was over. I really didn’t expect to feel so connected to the Archives after only one semester of interning there, but I think that really speaks to the positive, friendly environment that they have cultivated there. I’ll publish another blog post with my final thoughts, but I left Indy that day both relieved to have the internship done (now on to graduation – yay!) and sad that it went by so quickly.

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Wrapping up the digital media inventory https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/wrapping-up-the-digital-media-inventory/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/wrapping-up-the-digital-media-inventory/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 20:24:28 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=23 Read more »]]> I was finally able to finish the last of the digital media inventory during my last couple of weeks at the internship, as I was also starting to work on the grant narrative. At this stage in the inventory, I was merging Excel spreadsheets from multiple files where we had organized information about digital objects in the collections, tallying the final counts of each object type in the collection, and organizing the final tallies into a color-coded chart. This last task was primarily done as a result of the research I had done for the grant application – I assigned a color to each risk-level category of media obsolescence and created a chart so that we could look back at the Excel file and clearly see which items were most at-risk. It was really helpful at this stage to go to the documents Denise and I had created at the beginning of the internship and cross-check them with the new inventory files to verify that all of the information had been incorporated.

All in all, I might have liked a few more hours to continue polishing up the inventory, but I felt good about the progress I had made throughout the course of the semester. Hopefully, this inventory will prove useful when justifying funds needed for the mass-digitization project, as the inventory provided specific numbers of at-risk items and prioritized them further. It was nice to be able to work on this project throughout the semester and “cap it off” with the research and writing done for the grant application and to feel like I had contributed to the long-term end goals.

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Grant writing and research https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/grant-writing-and-research/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/grant-writing-and-research/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 20:23:48 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=21 Read more »]]> As the internship and the final parts of the digital inventory were coming to a close, I spent my last couple of weeks at the Archives working on doing research for the grant that they plan to apply for in the spring and beginning to draft some sections of the grant application. Angela and Denise gave me some past grant applications that they had worked on and some additional information about the organization sponsoring the grant so that I could figure out how to best cater the application narrative to the organization. The mass-digitization project is meant to help transfer information off of media in the collections that is at medium-to-high risk of obsolescence. In addition, the Archives plans to hire additional student workers to help with the digitization projects and would like to use this project to make materials available to groups who don’t normally frequent the Archives, like STEM majors. I spent a good portion of my time researching how to help minority and underrepresented groups get involved and feel welcomed in archives and special collections and looking into studies published by the Society of American Archivists and the Mellon Foundation that discussed various types of diversity (or often, the lack of diversity) in the special collections and archives field. I also did some research on digital preservation strategies and obsolescence levels for digital media in order to have concrete figures in place for the grant application. I was able to get a couple pages of the narrative sections for the grant application written and Denise edited and added to the document to make it more cohesive and detailed. Hopefully, they will be able to use some of the narrative I wrote as well as the research I found when they craft the final grant application in the spring!

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Observing instruction, part 2 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/observing-instruction-part-2/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/observing-instruction-part-2/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 20:22:08 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=19 Read more »]]> I was able to observe part of a class that Denise taught for upper-level undergraduate philanthropy students one afternoon. While I wasn’t able to stay for the whole class period, as I had to drive back to Bloomington, I was able to stay and help with the first part of class. The class consisted of probably around 12-15 students and Denise had them split up into groups of 3 for the in-class activity. Since the class was discussing the history of philanthropy, Denise had selected pamphlets and items from the Archives that fit into a set of categories that only she and I knew and she put them in folders for each group to select and discuss. She also designed a brief worksheet for each group that asked them to examine all three items in their folder to see if they could determine specific information about the item, like the intended audience and action, author/publisher, and date, before asking the students to figure out what the pamphlets might have in common and what their overarching theme might be.

The class session was really interactive and it was fun to see the students puzzle over some of the old pamphlets – although a lot of the students were pretty quiet at first, they quickly became engaged in the activity and collaborated with each other to figure out the answers to the questions. Denise made sure to keep things moving and asked the groups to present their findings to the class before moving on to the next activity. At this point, I ended up having to leave, but Denise had planned additional activities and discussion time for the rest of the class period as per the professor’s wishes. It was neat to see Denise present in a classroom setting, since the previous instruction session I observed was less of a class and more of a tutorial. Unfortunately, due to my schedule, this was the last instruction session I could observe this semester, but it was a great one to end on!

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A quick foray into collection development https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/a-quick-foray-into-collection-development/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/a-quick-foray-into-collection-development/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 20:21:05 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=16 Read more »]]> About midway through the internship, Denise assigned me a small collection development project, which was a nice change of pace from looking through boxes for the digital inventory for a couple of days. The items that were donated consisted of white and grey literature, as well as some relatively recent books that we were able to send on to the Philanthropy Library. Denise gave me some advice on how to determine whether or not we could 1) keep the item in Special Collections, 2) send the item to the Payton Philanthropy Library, or 3) not add the item to the collections, especially if IUPUI and/or other IU branches already owned the item. I spent a couple of afternoon searching for the items in WorldCat and IUCAT to see how rare the items were and if IU already had a copy somewhere and sorted the items for Denise to check through.

I had never worked with grey and white literature before, so it was interesting to see how those items could fit into the Archives’ collections once processed. I had done a little bit of collection development while volunteering as the librarian for the Classical Studies graduate library but had never had any formal training and wasn’t sure what the procedure was for a university library. Tagging each book with a colored slip of paper that had its destination marked on it was an easy way to mark each item and to signal to the person cataloging the items where each item was intended to go. Once the collection development project was done, I returned to working on the digital media inventory.

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Working through the digital media inventory https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/working-through-the-digital-media-inventory/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/working-through-the-digital-media-inventory/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 20:18:40 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=14 Read more »]]> As mentioned previously, one of the longer projects that I was working on throughout the semester was creating an inventory of digital media objects in the Archives’ processed and unprocessed collections. This involved sorting through finding aids in the Archives’ servers to look for media in the collections as well as in the finding aids in their ArchivesSpace database. I was able to find a lot of items that had been listed as “miscellaneous” or some other type of object rather than as “digital media” or other media objects and added them to the inventory. I also became very familiar with the layout of the moveable stacks and had almost memorized the locations of some collections by the time I was done, which I thought would never happen since there are so many boxes stored there! Although the work could get a little rote at times, I often listened to podcasts while I worked and enjoyed being able to get up and move to go fetch more boxes every few minutes – all of the walking and cart-pushing certainly made my Fitbit happy!

One of my favorite collections to sort through was the Junior Achievement mss. – both the unprocessed and processed parts! The bags and kits that the activities/programs came in were so fun to unpack and were frequent sources of CD-ROMs. My least favorite items were any slightly-heavy boxes on the very top shelf of the shelving units – even with the tall step-stools, I still felt just a smidgen too short and always considered it a massive victory when I was able to get a heavy box from the top shelf with no audible “Oof!” uttered. Another cool collection of digital media that I stumbled on accidentally included probably hundreds of photo CDs and recordings of IUPUI sports and art events, as well as building projects. I was really impressed by the wide variety of materials that the Archives possessed and enjoyed getting to look through various collections as I compiled the inventory.

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Observing instruction, part 1 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/observing-instruction-part-1/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/observing-instruction-part-1/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 19:47:45 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=12 Read more »]]> Early on in the semester, I was able to follow Denise along to an instructional session she led for graduate students in the Philanthropy graduate program at IUPUI. The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, according to its website, is “the world’s first school dedicated solely to the study and teaching of philanthropy.” The instruction session was a little over an hour-hour and a half long and consisted of Denise introducing the students to library resources and ways to search the library catalog and website for what they might need for papers and other research. I was so impressed with how quickly she was able to read the room and determine what level of library and research literacy the students had and how she was able to adjust her presentation accordingly. Many of the students weren’t aware of how to use the library catalog and didn’t know what search strategies to use to find items, and Denise was able to succinctly show them how to do so in a way that was easy to understand. On our way back to the Archives, she and I chatted a bit about the different types of instruction sessions she offers for classes and other groups of students and how she caters her instruction style and content to fit their needs. Although I’ve experienced several library instruction sessions as a student, it was neat to hear about how Denise plans and prepares to teach them and watch as an observer rather than merely as a student.

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Starting the digital inventory https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/starting-the-digital-inventory/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/starting-the-digital-inventory/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 19:45:20 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=10 Read more »]]> Ok, so it’s one thing to get the tour of the Archives and see all the boxes on all of the shelves in all of the ranges and theoretically ponder all of the items in said boxes. However, it is another thing ENTIRELY to start pulling boxes off of the shelves and then realizing just how many items are in each box (especially those little grey CD boxes – who knew you could fit like 50 CDs in there??) and how many boxes are on each shelf…et cetera, et cetera. Luckily, other employees at the Archives had already made a comprehensive Excel spreadsheet of where each manuscript series was located and how many boxes each series was comprised of, so items were relatively easy to find.

Denise had also made a really helpful Excel document with multiple sheets where I could document what type of media I found in each box and how many of each type of media were in each box. I was only looking for certain types of media, since the Archives had previously started a project with MDPI at IUB to work on audio and video tapes. The types of media I searched for throughout the collections included:

  • 8” floppy disks
  • 5.25” floppy disks
  • 3.5” floppy disks
  • CD-Rs, CD-ROMs, CD-RWs,
  • DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, DVD-ROMs, DVD+Rs, DVD+Rs
  • Thumb drives
  • Zip disks

I’ll continue detailing the work for this project in later posts, but now it’s time to move on to another part of the internship – instruction!

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Potential projects and preliminary ideas for the internship https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/potential-projects-and-preliminary-ideas-for-the-internship/ https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/2019/12/10/potential-projects-and-preliminary-ideas-for-the-internship/#respond Tue, 10 Dec 2019 19:42:44 +0000 https://blogs.iu.edu/dronesilvers/?p=8 Read more »]]> In my preliminary meeting with Angela and Denise, we discussed several projects that I could potentially work on throughout the course of the internship that could both add to my resume and assist the Archives with their ongoing work. We landed on several different projects or areas of interest that would suit our goals and could feasibly fit within the 120-hour internship process. The projects included:

  1. Developing an inventory of digital objects from processed and unprocessed collections that would eventually be used as part of a (hopefully) grant-funded mass-digitization project in the following year.
  2. Shadowing and assisting Denise and Angela with instruction sessions for undergraduate and graduate students throughout the semester as opportunities arose. While I wouldn’t be doing any instruction myself, I could watch how they catered instruction to specific classes or groups of students and assist them as needed.
  3. Performing small collection development projects as needed, as I hadn’t had much official collection development experience in the past and had never taken a course about it.
  4. Potentially helping with physical or online exhibits if time permitted (it didn’t – there was enough to do with the other projects!)
  5. Researching and drafting parts of the grant application that would be used for justifying and explaining the need for the mass-digitization project.

All of these projects were in areas that piqued my interest and I was excited to get started on the projects when my internship began during the first week of classes in August!

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