Week 1: Public History Central Team Lead

Hello! I'm excited to continue where I left off about two weeks ago in the summer semester, but now with the new role as team lead for the Public History Central project. As a refresher on my current progress, my goal is to graduate with a bachelor's degree in history sometime next year; simultaneously, I am completing my classes for my minor in Native American Studies. Since the beginning of the summer, I have explored various topics to conduct more in-depth research and delved into my interests in historical epidemics and pandemics across different periods. I found it could easily translate to outbreaks like smallpox and cholera in America during the country's early development and their intense impact, especially on Indigenous communities.

Sarah Boye's Leadership Training PPT.

My ongoing interest in preservation, initiated through outreach with community members, is at the forefront of my personal and professional goals for this internship. I anticipate completing as much as possible so that the artifacts collected from History Harvests can proceed to the next step of processing and become accessible to donors and researchers. As I mentioned earlier, I am taking a new step in leadership, which is thrilling, to say the least, as this is my first official lead role. However, this is an excellent place for me to start since I'll be working with someone who has previous experience with the process. I not only hope to gain leadership skills and potentially learn more about myself and how I work with others, but also to continue learning more about metadata and gain some practice with RICHES formatting for oral histories, since I previously worked more with spreadsheets.

Last semester was my first real exposure to the standards of the RICHES structure, and I worked through it to the best of my ability. Their guidebook was my closest colleague, and by the sounds of it, that will be the case again for the fall. Most of the feedback I received was personally from my team lead or other supervisors. The difference this time will be maintaining contact with their digital archivist, who will provide their overall feedback on the work we have been doing, firsthand. It will be interesting to see what changes I need to make to the spreadsheets and the extent of those changes, hopefully not on a major scale. Nonetheless, having access to these comments will help me improve the work for this project.

Still, I will get back into my detective mindset once my team returns to the collections. Previously, my biggest setback was building up the confidence to put my nervousness aside and communicate more with people, including the collection donors. It made all the difference in my output and the quality of my work, as I had more information to work with besides the research I had done alone. These kinds of skills don't form overnight, so I aim to continue to break out farther and farther from my space behind the keyboard and encourage myself to move forward in my progress.

Ultimately, I have the responsibility to create data as accurately as possible with the information I'm given, for the sake of preservation and passing on these artifacts for others to access. This internship will equip me with the skills and experience to continue that mission in future projects. If we have another History Harvest planned for this fall, it will be a perfect opportunity to speak with the community and potentially meet some of the Bumby family members again, which will align with the new Greenwood collection that needs to be processed.

Bumby home before the fire in 1911 - digitized over break.

I'm very much looking forward to working with everyone again, including the new interns on the other teams, and having the privilege of learning more about the archiving process.