Final Post: Oral Historian for the 20th Anniversary Joseph Beuys Tree Partnership

 As the collection aspect of the oral history project began to wind down, I had to move on to creating the final form of the project. As previously mentioned, the goal of this project was to create a sort of archive dedicated to the Joseph Beuys Tree Partnership and the amazing people responsible for its creation and maintenance. Once I had completed all the interviews and transcribed them, I had to organize the information in a way that would be most helpful to researchers utilizing this resource in the future. For this, I created a finding guide, which not only explained the project itself, but Joseph Beuys, the original artist who came up with the concept almost 50 years before UMBC began this project. I wrote small explanations for every interview, who the person was, what their role in the project was, and a small insight into what they touched on in the interview. This finding guide would be the first thing people would see when attempting to look further into the history of the Joseph Beuys Tree Partnership, of which my oral history collection is the major source.

The hopes for the future of this project, now that its completed are multi-fold. First, is for researchers, both within and outside of the university to be able to have a fuller understanding of the history of the institution and its cooperation with Baltimore City Parks and Recreation. Specifically for students at the university, this history becomes all the more important not only because they go to the institution, but also there are many chances to use oral histories in class, both within and outside of the field of history. Art students have before used oral histories to create visual storytelling which is both practice in animation and also enhances the history. Besides the recording and preservation of UMBC and Baltimore City history, this project will also invite the public to be more conscious of what goes into their neighborhood parks through twentieth anniversary celebrations and the availability of the final project to neighborhood committees. 

Overall, this internship was extremely fulfilling and beneficial in terms of my historical skill building. Not only have I been able to meet really amazing people in the non-profit and city planning sphere, I have strengthened my skills like negotiating meetings in stressful circumstances, creating relevant questions to ask, as well as recording, transcribing, and presenting the information gathered. Using my historical skills to reflect on more modern history was very interesting in that I was able to see different ways that my skills could be useful to me in the workplace, outside of academia. I had a great time working with the Sandra Abbott from the CADVC, and I learned so much this summer that I will bring with me.