My Internship

Part 2

Professional Development Interviews

The next task for my own career development was to conduct interview with people who are already in the field of archival work. Before each interview, I had to research each subjects previous experience and projects and create questions tailored to their individual paths. The goal for these interviews was to get a chance to learn more about my future and also get a chance to do some preliminary networking with people involved with prestigious organizations such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. Their unique challenges and concerns gave me a real and practical understanding of what to expect for the future, and gave me some really interesting ideas about how I can contribute to the field. Most importantly for me, I was able to take what I learned from these interviews and use them to strengthen the statements of purpose I was writing for grad school. Having real life experiences to draw from made me much more confident in the questions I posed in my statement and shows how I am engaged and ready to work as an archivist. Here are some of the experiences that my subjects shared with me...

Eddy Colloton

Eddy Colloton is currently a project conservator for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. He has also done work for a number of projects for such organizations as the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I learned about what conceptual and pragmatic challenges are in being talked about in trying to digitize large bodies of material for preservation. The most notable concern in the field was how to continues archival work in a way that is environmentally friendly and sustainable.

Charles Hosale

Charles Hosale works for the Library of Congress as part of the American Folklife Center. He shared about what it is like to do accession work for a large government entity. In our interview, we also talked about pathways in archives that go outside of academia and into doing projects for private companies. For example, during college, he did contractual work for MillerCoors brewing in preserving their long history of promotional material. His biggest advice was to learn how to find opportunities wherever they might appear.

Jolene Beiser

Jolene Beiser is an archivist in Special Collections as UC Irvine. Our talk was focused on her experiences working with archives focused on preserving popular media. Before coming to UCI, she worked for Cornell University's Hip Hop collection. The program was designed to preserve music and physical material from the early days of the medium in the 70's and 80's. I got to learn how a team figures out how best to collect that material and how to make it easier for historians to use them for research.

Final Project

Researching New Resources For Ethical Archiving

My final duties with Elvia and Special Archives was to go about finding a program or resource that would address concerns related to the LEAD ABC project. A significant portion of the material being collected included photographs taken of protests done at UCI Medical Center by health care workers and students focused on raising awareness towards police violence inflicted on people of color in recent years. Special Archives wanted to make these pictures available for research, but also wanted to have copies that would protect the identities of students and staff from any potential retaliation. Using photo editing software to individually erase the faces of protestors is a time consuming process, and I was tasked with seeing if there were better options available. I found an application which was designed to respond to this very problem called Image Scrubber, and it offered a quick and efficient way to blur portions of a photo while still keeping the original picture intact. Using a large batch of photos, I was able to show Elvia how a process that would normally take days could instead be accomplished in a matter of hours. All while using a program that is open source and freely available to avoid budgetary concerns related to licensing the software.

After finding the program, I then had to create a workflow document similar to the ones created by the department for all of their preservation tools. This guide would be used to instruct future interns and employees how to quickly adopt this program for their own use. I had to use the skills shared with me from my mentor, which was to not just know how to preserve materials, but to share my methods for others to use in clear and concise language. The document I created would be shared with the department as part of a proposal to determine if the program would be adopted for related projects in the future. If it was accepted, my guide would become part of the official documentation used after well after I graduate from UC Irvine.

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