Course: HIST 635 – Internship in Archives
Internship: Art, Culture and Technology Archives and Special Collections at MIT
Week 1 Time: Mon. 6/14 – 6 hours
Total Time: 6 hours
This summer and fall I’ll be completing an internship for one of my courses at UMass Boston. This will help me prepare practically for entering into the archives and public history fields. As part of my coursework, I’ll be completing journal entries each week. Hopefully it’ll help me keep track of my work and the things I’ve learned over the extent of the internship! I’ve chosen to do the journaling in the form of a blog in order to gain more confidence in public-facing writing. Please bear with me as I practice writing and hone my voice!
The internship that I’ll be working on for my course is at the Art, Culture, and Technology Archives and Special Collections at MIT. This is not a part of the regular MIT Distinctive Collections, it’s its own separate entity. It has one archivist, Thera (pronounced Terra) Webb, whom I’ll be working under, and unfortunately doesn’t have the same kind of resources that main MIT archives do. I think Thera is working on trying to unite the archives, and hopefully that’ll succeed, so she can easily take advantage of temperature controlled storage, potentially cold storage, and other significant resources that her collection needs.
I clearly don’t know everything about the ACT archive, but I’ve been doing some research and learning as I go. My first project is working on the finding aid for the Experimental Music Studio (EMS) magnet tapes that Thera found in random boxes in the archive, I think when she first started at MIT. She applied for a grant to digitize the magnet tapes as part of the Council on Library and Information Resources’ (CLIR) Records at Risk program, and she was awarded over $45,000! The tapes have been/are currently being digitized by Hal Wagner, the inventory list of tapes has been created by Thera, and I’m ready to get going! I’m definitely a little bit nervous. It’s fascinating how there is no perfect solution for finding aids. There is no universal code for what should be included, and every institution does them somewhat differently. I’ve learned a solid foundation for finding aids from my processing course last spring, so that is at least a bit reassuring! Still, it’s difficult to do something perfectly when perfect isn’t possible, and I love to (have to?) do things perfectly……….
This week I worked for six hours on Monday! I planned to do eight hours, but I was having a pretty hard time focusing, so I just did the best I could. With ADHD, that’s all you can do sometimes! For most of the morning I tried to find and read some orientation materials that Thera had put out for me, but of course I was in the wrong google docs folder and just a teensy bit confused (though I still found some great documents to look at!). Luckily, Thera and I met at 2pm and she was able to show me where the most important docs were, and I spent the rest of the afternoon looking them over. I checked out the proposal that Thera wrote in order to apply for the CLIR grant, which had an incredible amount of history about the project. She included an interview with the founder of the EMS, Barry Vercoe, a timeline of significant EMS events, and an inventory of all the tapes in the collection. I also checked out several different resources related to processing artwork, graphics, and other non-traditional archival materials, as well as preserving digital materials (all significant parts of the ACT collections). My plan for next Monday is to look more at the documents related to the preservation of recordings like the magnet tapes, and to do a little more looking into György Kepes, whose papers are one of the significant collections in the ACT. From there, I’ll dig into the finding aid! Thera is hoping that I can have it mostly complete within the next few weeks. I don’t think that’s going to be a problem, as she already did the inventory! I’m just going to see if there are any potential series in the collection, and then write the provenance, history, arrangement, and other notes. It’ll grow depending on the collection’s needs!
After the finding aid is complete, Thera has some pretty interesting projects for me to work on! One of the ones I’m most excited about is helping some students go through the old risograph prints from the ACT collection and pick pieces to create new art. I believe that’s the gist of the project, it’s hard for me to remember the details now! No matter what the specific details are, the project will give me opportunities to explore a super cool collection, learn about a unique form of printing, and work with researchers. Check, check, check!
Kayla Allen 