My Internship at the Laurel Historical Society #1

At the beginning of this semester, I started working on Fridays and Sundays as a museum intern at the Laurel Historical Society in Prince George's County. The LHS is located in an 1840's mill workers house and functions as a small museum as well as the organizations offices. I had always wanted to work in a museum, so I was really excited. However, I was also really nervous about it. What if it wasn't what I expected? What if it turned out that I was no good at the thing I had aspired to do since I was a kid?

My first day there started out pretty standard; I introduced myself to my coworkers, signed some papers, and was showed around by my boss. It was after all of the introductory stuff that I started to become uncertain. I began learning how to use the museums collections database, and I am absolutely terrible with technology. As Ann, the executive director of LHS, was teaching me how to find what I needed, I was barely looking at the screen as I wrote down step by step directions for each thing she showed me (I highly recommend writing stuff like this down for those of you who are also technologically challenged). Luckily for me, Ann was a great teacher - it probably helped that she used to work for Past Perfect (the database company) for a few years.

For the first few weeks I got myself comfortable with using Past Perfect. I would pull boxes from the collections and go through them in order of accession number and make sure all the information was correct and up to date. This might seem like along time, but I only worked two days a week for nine hours so it took me a little longer than I wanted.

I got my first research project at the beginning of October; I was doing the research for the Edgar Allan Poe event that was being held for the first time around Halloween. My main job was to provide an information station on Poe, but I also ended up providing additional information on literary figures contemporary to Poe such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and his fellow Gothic legends like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker. Seeing my work displayed around the museum was one of the most satisfying feelings I have ever experienced.