Internship at the Priddy Library (What the Job Entails)

Since last semester, I have been working with the Priddy Library for my internship. I have been working on various tasks since I started. For my internship, the main objectives are updating the history LibGuides, working with Omeka, curating exhibits, and researching topics for future exhibits. Omeka is a website that many libraries and archives use to help store information and create exhibits for online viewing. The Priddy Library has a section that uses Omeak called Past Events on the library's homepage. Last semester I mostly dealt with fixing the Libguides, which involved making sure the links were working, correcting grammar, and making everything look pretty. When a weblink did not work, it was up to me to find the original or come up with a better weblink to substitute the missing one. It was fun, and it had ups and downs. Some issues took a lot of time to fix and lead me to some strange places, while others were straightforward and quick. Some of those places lead me down a rabbit hole of sites that were taken over and used for other means that are not appropriate for both a school and work environment. Around this time, I was also working on Omeka. There I would upload projects that were either missing from the page or current. For example, USG Throughout the Years and communications class project.



 

1.1 The Cleaned version of HIST: 300 LibGuide page


Issues have come up since working with Omeka, and only recently did I figure out why. Much of what is posted is not uploaded to the main site. I found out, with some help, that we are using two sperate sites. The first one is Omeka Classic, and the second one is Omeka.net. Omeka Classic is attached to the Priddy Library main site, while Omeka.net is on its own. This means that while we may upload something on Omeka.net, it will not show up on the main site for the access comes from Omeka Classic. They are not linked in any way. As of February, I have been working with fixing the problems that this has caused, and I keep running into new issues. Internships are not always fun, but what is frustrating is deemed essential, and you must power on whenever you come across something like that. Hopefully, by the time March comes around, I will have finally fixed everything and made things easier for the library.



Figure 1.2 Omeka Classic site dealing with The Universities at Shady Grove


The newest project that I am currently working on is about women's suffrage in America. The idea of the project started in December, because this August it will be the 100th anniversary since women gained the right to vote in 1920. It has been slow since only two people are working on it right now, but I have come up with three themes. One is focusing on various women in D.C, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey because we want it to be relevant to the area the Priddy Library is located at. The second theme is focusing on events that occurred within a roughly ten-year span from 1910 to 1920. The last theme is using pictures to paint a story. I have spent about 30 hours working on the project so far, and I do not think it will pick up until the middle of March. I look forward to seeing what I do next. 

Internship with Lost Towns Project #1

At the start of the semester, I started my internship with the Anne Arundel County Archaeology lab for the Lost Towns Project. I was very excited because this would be my first time getting hands on experience in archaeology and preservation techniques. The Archaeology lab is located in historic London Town in Edgewater, Maryland. This made me even more excited because I had gone there for a field trip back in elementary school. I learned that the group works with collections from all over Maryland and that there is a lot of collaboration between the archaeology teams in Maryland’s counties. 

My first day was filled with clay pipes and a little bit of recording. By recording I mean that the lab has a database software that houses all of the artifact information. My job was to enter all of that paper information into that system. That was where I started to learn more about the different types of artifacts (colors, techniques used to create them, ect.). Each kind of artifact has its own cleaning process, but most of them only require some brushing off or being scrubbed with some water. In the case of the clay pipes, they needed the dirt scrubbed off with water and the dirt on the inside forced out with a needle and pipe cleaners. At one point while cleaning out the inside of one pipe, I got a little too forceful and poked a hole in my finger like with sowing. Oops! You might be wondering why cleaning out the hollow insides were so important? Turns out, the boreholes are used to figure out the time period from when they were made (they shrink a little bit over time!).

I was surprised at how laid back the environment was and how straightforward the process is. I am the kind of person who over thinks everything, so it was nice to start with something simple. Overall, I enjoyed my first day and I’m looking forward to what happens next!