And So It Ends (Internship Reflection)

Well it’s officially the last week of my internship at SU’s Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) and I’m sad to say it’s official that we won’t have enough done in time for me to do the finding aid.  I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty disappointed about that for a few reasons, the first being that I really would have liked to have shown that to everyone from my friends to future employers to really show the extent of how much I did in this project.  The second reason though is simply that I would have really liked to have gotten the experience with EAD.  I have a little, we created a finding aid for a personal collection for one of my classes using EAD and at the beginning of this internship I updated an existing finding aid in EAD when part of my collection was temporarily unavailable.  But the additional time with it would have been really beneficial and I think could have really helped me out in the long run.  Still, I did get a lot of this internship (which technically spanned the time of two internships) so I guess I can’t complain.  C’est la vie and all that.

What I did get from my time at the SCRC was a just about everything else that goes along with processing a collection.  We started by surveying the entire collection (and seeing as I’ve put in 300 hours and we still aren’t done, it’s clearly a pretty big collection).  Although I wish we’d used the lists we made during the survey a little more later in the process, I did find it gave me a very good idea of the kind of collection I was really dealing with.  Next I moved onto tackling the organization and foldering of the extensive personal correspondence that had been donated (something I’ve discussed at length previously so I won’t get into it much here).  Although I did hit a point of frustration with this part of the job because of the time it took, I very truly enjoyed the detective role I got to play in comparing handwriting, searching content for continuity, etc in order to identify correspondents.  In the end, four months later, I ended up with 10 linear feet of neatly alphabetized and foldered personal correspondence and a really extensive understanding of the kind of man who created the collection and what his life was like, at least in part.  Passionate is the best word I can come up for him, with all the good and bad connotations that come with it.

In the last month or so, I finished my stretch of this internship by first organizing the rest of the contents of the collection into reasonable series and began organizing, foldering, and boxing as much as I could and creating lists of their contents in Excel.  I have sadly only had time to complete five series in this entirety (including 22 linear feet of programs that we decided just to put in chronological order and box without folders).  But that disappointment in and of itself is really a lesson because I learned how long this process really does take.  Plus, I at least got a lot of satisfaction from those five series once they were all neatly boxed and labeled and put back on the shelf.  There were frustrating days and there were fun days, but that too is part of any job and overall I’d say I enjoyed my internship very much.  Now I just need to graduate and find a position a little more permanent so I can make another collection my baby and have the chance to see it the whole way through.