Week 1:
African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa

June 1, 2013

I can’t believe two weeks of my internship area already over. I’m going to split each week into a blog, for simplicity. The first week I spent the majority of my time between several projects. I worked on updating the museum’s traveling exhibits and website, fact checking, researching, and editing. I also worked a bit in their library, focusing on placing newly donated books, and confirming that everything was in order. Finally, I started one of my big projects while I’ll be at the museum: the oral histories project.

A little background on the museum’s traveling exhibitions. They work in conjunction to the Museum’s stated mission to preserve, exhibit, and teach the African American heritage of Iowa. The work I did was mainlining and editing the current projects for easier and more engaging access to patrons. The website work was a little different. I worked on editing the code of the Iowa Roots, Global Impact: The Life and Legacy of George Washington Carver virtual tour. This just means that I made sure everything was working correctly and was properly cited. While these projects gave me background information on Iowa history, it was just the first step to the in depth work that would come with the oral histories.

For the oral histories project I would go through the edited copies of the histories, rip them from the dvds, convert the videos to a viable format, then add them to the archiving software system. After this, I’d convert the transcripts of these histories to a digital format, then .pdf, and add them to the archiving software. Once everything would be added correctly, I’d help them go live online so that patrons would have easy access to the materials instead of having to come into the museum to watch each story. I was only able to work about half a day on this, and the start was rocky. Video files were corrupt and conversion being buggy, but I had faith it would all work out.

Here are a couple other things I took away from week one:

Half hour lunch breaks are strangely liberating.
My work at Cornell has really prepared me for the technical aspects of the work.
The block plan is a very short amount of time to do as much as we do, I’ve project hopped like crazy because I’m so used to working quickly.