A library internship: UMBC Special Collections project on Lawrence Watt – Evans

Hello all! My name is Samantha Rogers and I am a junior History Major here at UMBC. For my first history related internship, I was accepted to work in the Special Collections department of the Albin O. Kuhn Library located past the gallery on the ground floor. I was told I would be working on the Lawrence Watt – Evans collection. Watt-Evans is a science fiction writer whose correspondences, manuscripts, convention materials, and personal notes the library has collected over the years. I was informed that the series needed to be organized, first alphabetically then chronologically, before moving it to proper holding and storage units. However, they first trained me as a front desk associate, which was extremely beneficial for I learned the LoC (Library of Congress) system for archives and databases, which most other universities, institutions, and museums use. Seeing how I would like to enter the museum field, this should prove useful to me in the future.

Starting in January, I have been working with the convention material first, organizing it and refiling it into a new system for storage. I believed I was done with this series until my supervisor and I discovered that a past intern had misplaced two large boxes, so I had to practically start over (since folders were numbered) to integrate the missing material. This was one of the first lessons learned in properly labeling and storing the collection; a lesson I will take into further work. While I am still working on this particular project, I hope to be done and continue into personal notes and manuscripts within the following weeks.

From this internship, I hope to learn more about the archival system used by libraries and museums alike, as well as gain insight into databases and collection agencies utilized by both public and private owners in collection series such as the Watt-Evans papers. We are also looking forward to (hopefully) having Mr. Evans come and speak at UMBC!

All the darker boxes are the unorganized materials before I began working on it, the next is the beginning of my relabeling and reorganizing the papers. Not pictured is the mess I had to correct from the previous intern and the missing white boxes