U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Internship

I am Jennifer Ford, a senior at UMBC-Shady Grove enjoying my final few months of undergraduate life. My internship this semester is with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as a writing and editing intern for their blog, VAntage Point. Through working in this capacity, I am able to combine my passion for writing with my deep appreciation for U.S. service members. My internship is perfect for Public History because I am doing direct work finding ways to make large historical concepts accessible to the public in a captivating way. Not everyone knows someone serving in the military or has a personal interest in Veterans. Through writing for the VA’s blog, I am able to peak public interest in individual Veteran stories, allowing important history to find an meaningful place in everyday life.

The majority of my work focuses on Veteran of the Day blog posts. These are posts highlighting a specific veteran and their service. Many of these are written about whomever we are personally interested in featuring from the archives, but we also write about veterans nominated by friends and family. I was even able to put together a piece about a friend who died serving in the Navy this past year. We also work on some sensitive projects, putting together a piece ahead of time for well-known veterans that may pass away soon, so it is ready to go on the blog at a moment’s notice. The internship requires working knowledge of Slack (a communication platform), and Trello (a group project coordination platform). There are over one hundred of us working on multiple parts of a project each day, so effective communication is vital.

There are so many things I love about this internship! First, the experience I am getting to practice my writing and editing. Second, the opportunity to learn about collaborative platforms. These communication skills are going to be vital in any work environment I come across in the future. Third, did I mention that this internship is completely digital? As someone who works two jobs and goes to school full time, this digital internship works perfectly with my schedule since the writing and editing work can be done on my own time. Fourth, and most importantly, it is extremely gratifying being able to write meaningful pieces that act as a memento for friends and family of the veterans. Knowing that the service and sacrifice of your loved one is honored and appreciated is no small thing. I am grateful to have found such a gratifying and flexible internship.

Please take a moment to view some of my work in honor of Kevin S. Bushell:
https://www.blogs.va.gov/VAntage/53085/navy-veteran-kevin-s-bushell/

Maryland State Archives

Hello to all. I will be sharing my experience as an intern at the Maryland State Archives during the summer of 2018.  I have to say off the bat, that if you are interested in becoming an archivist, conservator, or work in a special collections setting, the State Archives is a wonderful organization to go intern at.  The on the job training that you get is top notch.  Many of their former interns work at the National Archives in Washington D.C. and in College Park as well as other archives all over the country.  They also hire a lot of their former interns back after they graduate (although not immediately after).  One of the better aspects of interning there is that you have the opportunity to shadow in many of the other departments.  This really allows you to expand your internship beyond which ever department you might work in.  You do not have to take part in the shadowing opportunities, but 1) they are a good way to break up your day and 2) they give you good insight as to how the archive as a whole operates.  I was fortunate to be able to work in the Appraisals and Descriptions department, which is the first line for any archive. I had applied for two other departments other than A&D, and while I was originally a bit disappointed with this, it probably turned out to be the best internship at the archive this summer.  This department os responsible for intake, describing, accessioning, data entry, and then records placement.  That department is also responsible for assessing and maintaining the condition of all the records and documents not in the sphere of the Special Collections department.  Although I did not get to do all of that, I did get to take part in a couple of smaller projects that are part of the regular upkeep process.  That included assessing the condition of several groups of records, primarily mid to late 19th century court dockets and criminal records.  One of the great things about working in this department was that they probably get to work across departments more than any other individual department.  So for example, I got to work with the Conservation Department for many of the projects that I was a part of, as well as Reference.  We did some work with Special Collections as well. I don't really want to get into too much of what I did over the summer in this posting because it would take too long and I have two other posts I need to do as well, however one of the more basic projects I started off in was a relabeling effort.  The reason things needed to be relabeled is a very long and complicated story.  Long story short, the current archive was built in 1983 and when it opened files from all across the state came in batches larger than the archive could properly handle at the time.  So things got assigned a temporary accession number and then thrown on a shelf with the intent of coming back at a later time to assign a permanent accession number and then properly label the records.  Only half of this got done.  Over the course of 35 years archivists assigned proper accession numbers and updated the guide, but never had the resources to go back and relabel everything.  If you ever get a chance to go in the archive stacks, you'll understand why.  They are massive.  So that is basically what the first two weeks of my internship was doing, relabeling thousands of records. I think we came up with a total of 10,000 clamshells and boxes, that had no prior or incorrect labeling, that were relabeled.  It was a pretty large and tedious undertaking, but entirely needed.  Like I said, it was tedious, but the entire staff at the archive appreciated the effort.  The archive has a lot of basic jobs/problems similar to this one that need to get taken care of but they don't have the resources do them due to improper or inadequate funding.  While they are very basic jobs, they are essential to a properly functioning archive and they rely on interns to do many of those jobs, and the state of extremely appreciate of those efforts.  For my next post I'll talk about the project that took up a large portion of my time that I actually got to plan and coordinate, and then led a team of interns to execute that plan.

Patapsco Heritage Greenway Internship Final Post

Firstly I would like to thank Lindsey Baker the Director of Patapsco Heritage Greenway who gave me the opportunity to work on these projects and Dr. Meringolo of the History Department of UMBC for setting me up with this opportunity. I cant thank either of you enough.

First I'm going to start by talking about the project that I did for my last month of my internship. Then I will talk about the project overall and what I thought about it.

The project for the last month of my internship was to create an inventory of all of the environmental, cultural, and historical signage in the Patapsco Valley Heritage area. I was to find all signage that I considered significant enough to be included in the inventory. There wasn't a real road-map or criteria for the signage itself, so I created one throughout the process. Choosing what to keep and what to get rid of as far as importance of sites. To explain further I was going to go into these areas, find the signs themselves, take pictures of them, and add them to a inventory. The inventory itself was an excel document that I set up so that each numbered cell matched up with a picture of the same number. The pictures are in a folder with the numbers of the matching cells underneath. The following cells I would list the were: county, and location, what type of site it was, an location/coordinates of exactly where it is located, and finally a description of the site, or the actual wording on the sign itself. Depending on the type of sign it is would determine how much data the sign would have in the description. I also created a map where i marked all the locations I had visited and each marks a set of coordinates that matched the one in the excel document. I did this so whoever was looking at the inventory could have a physical representation of the locations. In all I did about 100 separate signs throughout the area, limited by weather and construction due to weather that closed me off to some area, and blocked me from others.

Overall the project and the internship itself was fantastic and a great learning experience for my degree. Especially in the last month I got to use a lot of my skills that I've accrued over my degree. This project gave me the freedom to create and make decisions and not just do a predetermined tasks. Lindsey gave me the freedom to create my internship and get the absolute most out of it I could. She gave me wonderful feedback consistently even amidst all the flooding and weather issues they were having in Ellicott City where the office is located. Lindsey and the entire PHG staff were extremely welcoming and wonderful to me. They involved me in conversations about projects that weren't exclusively mine and other things they were working on as well to keep me involved. I learned a lot about how the skills I learned from this degree can be applied in the working world and that's a perspective I never had in till now.

Again I would like to thank anyone that helped me in getting this internship, and everyone that helped me during it. I cant thank you enough for the opportunity.

If you want to see some of the things I've done or keep up with PHG, or want to learn more about it :
https://patapsco.org/about-us/phg_mission/

Maryland State Archives Internship Part1

I am Zach Tucker, first semester graduate student at UMBC and my internship this semester is with the Maryland State Archives. My involvement with the Maryland State Archives for this semester will be in service to their Legacy of Slavery in Maryland: Judge Lynch’s Court database. They currently are trying to compile all sources and resources they have on lynchings from 1860 to the final Maryland lynching in 1933. My responsibilities were to track exactly what narratives had sources, narratives, and how far in the legal process these victims got before they were murdered. This also entailed going through Sherrilyn Ifill’s book On the Courthouse Lawn and looking through her footnotes and sources for things we could include in the Judge Lynch’s Court exhibit.  It proved to be a rewarding, if tedious, practice in deep historiographical anaylsis.

For several weeks my work consisted of a lot of collaborative excel work. Gabriella Giannachi’s Archive Everything: Mapping Everyday provided some solid base information on how to catalogue the massive amount of resources at the archive. During this time, I also had the pleasure of helping catalogue a new set of documents that the archives had received. It was a box full of Attorney General’s reports and signed statements from police officers implicating people in a lynch mob. It is hard enough to find any sort of official documentation in regard to lynchings let alone one that names the people responsible. That was an incredible experience though the subject matter leaves you fairly drained just because of the horrendous nature of these events.

As I was finishing up my database I discovered a lynching victim who was not included on the site. Joseph Cocking was the last of three white men lynched in Maryland, so I asked my supervisor why he had not been included in the site. As it turns out, they had not looked/found any sources on his lynching so they had removed him from their listing. I was then charged with searching newspaper and county document sets for any reflections of his murder.

I had plenty of experience with microfilm and newspaper archive searching so I dug up a substantial number of sources there. Additionally, I went through court minutes and judicial dockets looking for the rare legal reflections of these incidents. We were lucky in that this was one of, if not the only instance of legal charges being filed against the sheriff and jailer for failing to protect their prisoner from a lynch mob. Drawing on these primary sources I pieced together not just the narrative for the murders Joseph Cocking was accused of and the lynching, but also the multiple attempts at charging the sheriff with negligence in they years afterward. The final step of this process was me typing up a several page narrative, photographing applicable sources, and creating PDFs of newspapers to create a new entry on the Judge Lynch’s Court website.

Final Project for Patapsco Heritage Greenway and Final Reflections

My internship with Patapsco Heritage Greenway was an eye-opening experience. I learned more about the work done in small cultural organizations and it gave me a different perspective on the relationship between these types of groups and communities of color. Before I left PHG, I had one last project for the summer. I spent the month of August writing an action plan as my final project.

            The action plan listed some of the most important areas of improvement for PHG with respect to their engagement with Latinx park users. Based on the time I spent with PHG and the work I did for them, I recommended six steps they should take in the near and distant future. These steps encourage PHG to address a range of concerns from following the guide of the toolkit I created the month before, to taking a close look at the interactions between Latinx and non-Latinx park users, and to revising the ways in which PHG interprets the history of the area. In October, I will present my summer work and the steps of this action plan to the PHG board.

            Overall, I have two major takeaways from this internship. The first is related to work environments. In the past, I have met and worked with people or organizations that talked about outreach with diverse communities but never really made the effort to form a relationship, as if they expected the communities to come to them. Because of this, I was unsure of what to expect from this internship. Thankfully, I wasn’t disheartened about the state of public history any further. From the outset, I knew that PHG was taking their outreach strategies seriously and they genuinely wanted to inform themselves about the best ways to go about improving them. I always felt like my work, voice, and perspective mattered. I wasn’t there to only translate materials; I was there because PHG valued my skills and experience and they gave me room to apply them in different ways. Not only was this a refreshing environment to be in but it also gave me the confidence to speak honestly and pushed me to work on my projects with the best of my abilities. This showed me how the right kind of work environment can be difference-maker in one’s experience and how great public history could be for students of color like me.

The second takeaway is about the role of organizations like PHG. I’ve been fortunate so far in my life to not have been explicitly discriminated against because of my background or have had a personal encounter with someone directing hurtful language at me. While I know that not everyone can say the same, I was alarmed to hear about the treatment of Latinxs at some of Maryland’s state parks. There have been occasions where Latinxs have been discouraged to enter and use parks by signs made by non-Latinx park users with phrases like “illegal aliens stay out!” This reinforced my belief in the importance of the work of cultural organizations. Cultural organizations carry the responsibility to serve all communities equally and to ensure they all have fair access to parks or other services. This is also means making sure that all communities feel safe and welcomed by taking any hostile or antagonistic behaviors seriously and taking a stand against such behaviors. There is so much time and effort that goes into this kind of work but ultimately, I am hopeful that public historians and community leaders and members can make it happen. My summer with PHG taught me many lessons and my experiences were particularly valuable to career path I envision for myself.

Baltimore Museum of Industry Internship Part 1

Baltimore Museum of Industry Internship Part 1

Hello, my name is Debbie Farthing. I am a first semester grad student and this is my first internship.  The internship is at the Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI) under the supervision of Jane Woltereck the Director of collections and exhibits.  Jane and I worked together at another museum several years ago until I left to go back to school.  When Jane went to work at the BMI five years, I began volunteering for her.  Therefore, I have a good working relationship with her and am very familiar with the department.

The BMI focuses on the different industries that helped build Baltimore and the men and women who worked in those businesses.  Several galleries present different aspects of Baltimore’s industrial past and present, including food production, canning, printing, industrial machining, and the garment industry.   The Garment Loft is a permanent exhibit that recreates an early 1900s garment factory.  Leading into the garment loft is an area for changing installations that looks much like a large department store window.  It is for this area that I will create the new installation. 

Over the past few years, I have created other installations for the garment loft window but this time I have far more responsibilities and opportunities.   In the past, I usually chose the garments and other objects that went into the window, created the dress forms, and did the installation.  Another member of the BMI staff usually wrote the text panels from research materials I provided.  For this installation,I have more control of the process from creating the timeline and budget to researching and writing the text panels.  Additionally, this time we will remove all items from the space, giving me a blank canvas to work with, whereas before I had to work the installation around text panels and signs hung on the back wall.   This means that I have to work more closely with the facilities staff at the BMI to assess whether the space needs repainting or just touching up and to include labor and possibly the cost of new paint in my budget. 

Another aspect of this process is creating dress forms for the garments.  I have done this in the past but used dress forms that I loaned to the BMI.  The BMI has a group of dress forms they have not used in many years and I will remake some of them so that I do not have loan my dress loans anymore.   An article I found online plus tips from the book A practical guide to costume mounting by Lara Flecker have given me some new ideas on how to redo the BMI’s dress forms.  Another volunteer at the BMI helps me with doing the mounts for the garments and she and I will work on this together again.  Her help and input are crucial and invaluable to me.

I am excited for this project in part because I truly enjoy this process but also because I have more control over the look of the space and I am learning new processes and trying out new ideas.

Debbie Farthing

Creating the Community Outreach and Engagement Toolkit for Patapsco Heritage Greenway

            After my first month with Patapsco Heritage Greenway, I was eager to keep learning about ways to best engage with Latinx communities and to collect and synthesize all this information for PHG. In July, I translated some materials and completed my second project. Translating materials was an ongoing task I had throughout the summer. Doing so was not only helpful for PHG but it allowed me to use and improve my Spanish. As a native Spanish speaker, I had to familiarize myself with terminology that I don’t normally use in my everyday life but that is common in this kind of professional setting. My foremost responsibility for July, however, was to make a toolkit that could serve as a guide for organizations who wanted to develop outreach and engagement strategies with Latinx communities.

            The work I did in June for the annotated bibliography was a great starting point for creating the Community Outreach and Engagement Toolkit. Reading through many of those resources and model park programs helped me to think of how to structure this toolkit. After a short introduction, I decided to follow that with four principle actions: know your users or visitors, assess cultural competency, create and strengthen relationships, and lastly, establish short- and long-term goals. For each action, I wrote a description of what it means or involves, added questions meant to serve as discussion starters, and listed related resources and materials. I aimed to write the toolkit concisely and in a thought-provoking way for an audience of cultural institutions and organizations. Using Omeka, I was able to turn the toolkit into a slide exhibit that made it accessible and appealing for PHG and other organizations to use.  

            Through this project, I hoped to complicate ideas of positive outreach and engagement. How can predominantly white organizations establish a good rapport with communities of color? It takes more than translating materials into multiple languages. A critical part of it entails understanding the community you want to engage with and understanding how the message, policies, and behaviors of your organization directly influence your relationship with communities. Organizations must take the time and necessary steps to respectfully serve the community’s wants and needs. Assessing cultural competency is crucial here. To help organizations start this important process of evaluating cultural competency, I wrote a reflection sheet that includes 10 key points to consider. This reflection sheet calls for deep reflection on everything from the makeup of an organization’s board, to their hiring and promoting practices, and to the culture and nature of the work environment.

            I gained a lot of insight from my research and from meetings I had with other people and organizations who had already initiated a positive relationship with Latinxs and who were just starting to think Latinx engagement. After writing the annotated bibliography, creating the Community Outreach and Engagement toolkit, and spending a couple months with Patapsco Heritage Greenway, I was ready to prepare an action plan for PHG as my final project.