Maryland State Archives

Hello to all. I will be sharing my experience as an intern at the Maryland State Archives during the summer of 2018.  I have to say off the bat, that if you are interested in becoming an archivist, conservator, or work in a special collections setting, the State Archives is a wonderful organization to go intern at.  The on the job training that you get is top notch.  Many of their former interns work at the National Archives in Washington D.C. and in College Park as well as other archives all over the country.  They also hire a lot of their former interns back after they graduate (although not immediately after).  One of the better aspects of interning there is that you have the opportunity to shadow in many of the other departments.  This really allows you to expand your internship beyond which ever department you might work in.  You do not have to take part in the shadowing opportunities, but 1) they are a good way to break up your day and 2) they give you good insight as to how the archive as a whole operates.  I was fortunate to be able to work in the Appraisals and Descriptions department, which is the first line for any archive. I had applied for two other departments other than A&D, and while I was originally a bit disappointed with this, it probably turned out to be the best internship at the archive this summer.  This department os responsible for intake, describing, accessioning, data entry, and then records placement.  That department is also responsible for assessing and maintaining the condition of all the records and documents not in the sphere of the Special Collections department.  Although I did not get to do all of that, I did get to take part in a couple of smaller projects that are part of the regular upkeep process.  That included assessing the condition of several groups of records, primarily mid to late 19th century court dockets and criminal records.  One of the great things about working in this department was that they probably get to work across departments more than any other individual department.  So for example, I got to work with the Conservation Department for many of the projects that I was a part of, as well as Reference.  We did some work with Special Collections as well. I don't really want to get into too much of what I did over the summer in this posting because it would take too long and I have two other posts I need to do as well, however one of the more basic projects I started off in was a relabeling effort.  The reason things needed to be relabeled is a very long and complicated story.  Long story short, the current archive was built in 1983 and when it opened files from all across the state came in batches larger than the archive could properly handle at the time.  So things got assigned a temporary accession number and then thrown on a shelf with the intent of coming back at a later time to assign a permanent accession number and then properly label the records.  Only half of this got done.  Over the course of 35 years archivists assigned proper accession numbers and updated the guide, but never had the resources to go back and relabel everything.  If you ever get a chance to go in the archive stacks, you'll understand why.  They are massive.  So that is basically what the first two weeks of my internship was doing, relabeling thousands of records. I think we came up with a total of 10,000 clamshells and boxes, that had no prior or incorrect labeling, that were relabeled.  It was a pretty large and tedious undertaking, but entirely needed.  Like I said, it was tedious, but the entire staff at the archive appreciated the effort.  The archive has a lot of basic jobs/problems similar to this one that need to get taken care of but they don't have the resources do them due to improper or inadequate funding.  While they are very basic jobs, they are essential to a properly functioning archive and they rely on interns to do many of those jobs, and the state of extremely appreciate of those efforts.  For my next post I'll talk about the project that took up a large portion of my time that I actually got to plan and coordinate, and then led a team of interns to execute that plan.