Post by my intern Tabitha Masters

 

Due to COVID-19, I found myself a bit lost in the concluding semesters of my undergrad at CMU. It took me a while to find my niche in my studies, and I felt like I would not be able to have any “real world” experiences before graduating due to the pandemic. That changed, however, when I became a hybrid intern for the Clarke Historical Library. The first day in person with Marian at the Clarke was my first hands on experience in the archival world. I processed a box from the Leonard Oil Refineries collection, sorting through all the material and withdrawing a lot of content that lacked relevancy to the collection, then I created a finding aid. Filtering through material to withdraw was a bit more challenging than anticipating, having to discard pieces that I personally thought were interesting, but did not fall within the scope of the collection. The online portion to the naked eye was a simple task, but many questions arose while typing up the Box and Folder listings, as well as encoding, the Athletics collection. Keeping the collection titles correct and putting them into alphabetical order and entering them into the encoding template. The majority of the work I completed over the semester was Athletics, but I also worked to encode the Moonyeen Albrecht collection. Throughout the course of this semester-long internship, I got a glimpse of what physical processing, encoding, and organizing archival information is like. As a result, I can say I am much more confident as I graduate and continue on in this field.