My name is Morgan Miller and for my graduate
internship, I was able to work at the Maryland State Archives (MSA) in the
Special Collections Department. The Special Collections Department was the best
fit for me because Special Collections is where you get to see all the cool and
unique stuff! For the purposes of my blog posts, I will go through the
beginning, middle, and end of my internship through the collections that I was
able to work on. My central question has been: what is the best way to make a
collection accessible to the public? So let’s start at the beginning! I was
able to go through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Photo collection (MSA
SC 908) and update the MSA catalog.
The WPA Photo Collection is a collection of
photographs for the book Maryland: A
Guide to the Old Line State. This was done through the Federal Writers’
Project, as part of the WPA. The collection goes through different scenes from
the different counties within Maryland. These scenes include photos of houses,
agriculture work, leisure activities, and industrial work that range from the
U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis to the first George Washington Monument in
George Washington Monument State Park, Washington County, Maryland. Catalog
information ranged from detailed descriptions of photos to simple phrases like
“man fishing” or “children on road”.
Naturally, this presented a problem for the MSA
catalog. Who could find a picture they wanted to see if the only information
they saw was “man fishing”? What if they needed a photo from a specific county
and could not find that information accessible?
It became my task to fix this issue.
Through the help of my superiors, Maria Day and Megan
Craynon, I was able to formulate a template to input information from the
photos into the catalog. If you go to the website and look at MSA SC 908-1-1,
you will see a description that follow this format:
City, County. Object in photo, location (or any extra
information found with the photo or on it). WPA Number.
This format allows people to see all the information
associated with the photo that is being described. Now the caption “man
fishing” has a location and any other information that could be found relevant.
The first part of my MSA experience has been amazing.
Being taught how to catalog information has helped me in other areas of my life
and has taught me a lot about myself. I look forward to my next blog post about
the middle part of my MSA experience!
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