Reflecting on My Time at the Space Telescope Science Institute

      During my internship with the Space Telescope Science Institute, I had the opportunity to learn many skills, both involving archives and how professional archives operate.  I primarily worked on two types of projects: processing physical collections, and digital archiving.  At the beginning of the internship, I was most excited to work with a digital collection as I had never had the opportunity prior.  Through the digital archiving projects, I was able to gain many new skills in archiving, including working with metadata, ingesting material from the Space Telescope Science Institute website to the digital archive, and learning archival methods for processing digital material.  I also enjoyed working with the analog collections that I was able to process.  Although I had some previous experience with this, it was very interesting to see the detailed process that the Space Telescope Science Institute employed with their collections.  I found myself enjoying the change of pace that the analog collections provided, giving me a break from looking only at the computer, and the various types of materials held in each collection.  Having both the digital and analog material allowed me to switch between projects, giving me a change of pace when I began feeling burnt out from one project. 

        The Space Telescope Science Institute also allowed me to work on smaller projects.  One such project was aiding in arranging a small exhibit about the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions.  The project was interesting, imploring me and the archives team to be creative with the limited space within the display case and use some technical know-how to arrange the display.  Finally, I most appreciated the Space Telescope Science Institute allowing me to experience many professional aspects of working in an archive, such as attending different team meetings and being a part of some archive website demonstrations as they sought to change software.  The meetings allowed me to understand how a corporate archive runs and fits into a larger mission.  The archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute stands to serve the employees in their work connecting to astronomy and it was interesting to see how that impacted the archive focus.  For example, much more meticulous care was given in processing at the item level than I had seen in previous archives.  The reason such care was taken was to serve the employees as they did research into past astronomical achievements and studies with the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes.  The exposure to working in a corporate archive and the opportunity to experience other professional aspects of the job made my internship with the Space Telescope Science Institute truly stand out.        

(The image is a Hubble Press Release titled, “Hubble Space Telescope Resolves Gaseous Ring Around Supernova,” from HubbleSite; https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1990/news-1990-07.html?Year=1990&itemsPerPage=100.)