Author: ras740 (Page 4 of 7)

This past spring semester (2019), APH student Alec Ferretti interned at the New York Historical Society in New York City. Below you’ll find Alec’s blog post about his experience.

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Hello, I’m Alec Ferretti, and I’m finishing up my Masters in Archives.  I have set aside every Monday of this semester to intern at the New-York Historical Society, processing backlogged collections in their manuscripts division.  

I spent most of my time working with the Irving Olds papers.  Olds was an interesting man whose name has been somewhat lost to history.  Born in the late 19th century in Pennsylvania, Olds went on to graduate Yale and Harvard with law degrees, and become a clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.  He later took a position at one of the world’s largest law firms, White & Case, and eventually became a partner there. Through his business dealings, he built relationships with the management of U.S. Steel, and was appointed its Chief Executive Officer in 1940, a position in which he served for 12 years.  Upon his retirement, he maintained a long list of social contacts, and was involved in many philanthropic activities in the greater New York area.

Part of the difficulty of processing this collection was that the meat and potatoes had been excised before N-YHS had gotten it.  Presumably, his Holmes papers are with Holmes; his White & Case papers are with White & Case, and his U.S. Steel papers are with U.S. Steel.  I hope they are at least, because they weren’t here! What remained were truly his personal papers, records of pleasantries exchanged between him and his associates, historical records passed down through his family, personal financial records, pertaining to his taxes and properties.  I had to figure out how to highlight the humdrum records of someone who was in actuality a very interesting man.

Olds knew many interesting people, so some of the more gripping parts of the collection were in the photographs.  I came across a portrait of Olds with New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, and it was signed by the mayor himself. Around 1960, Olds traveled to Moscow as part of a delegation planning the World’s Fair, and even appeared in a group shot with the then Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.  There were fancy portraits of prominent attorneys at White & Case, and there were many shots from Cooper Union, where Olds served on the board of directors.

When all was said and done, I had managed to process over 18 linear feet of material, and actually had time to create a much smaller finding aid for a second collection, one of the records of a Veteran’s Club of which I find no record online.  Perhaps in the future, these collections will help bring to light both Olds’ and the club’s legacies.

This past spring semester (2019), APH student Channell (Channy) Nicole Jordan-Grier interned at the Apollo Theatre in New York City. Below you’ll find Channy’s blog post about her experience.

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During the Spring of 2019, I had the pleasure of interning at the Apollo Theatre’s archives under the supervision of Digital Archivist, Brad San Martin. The archives are fairly new, only having a full time archivist since 2018 and because of this, a lot of my internship I was tasked with helping build the foundation for a repository that will encompass the history of Black performers in Harlem. The archive is full of performance recordings, promotional photographs, and other nuggets of history that don’t seem to be connected and yet all fit together. The main portion of my internship was a lot of identification and processing work with the occasional meeting with other performing arts archivists. From this internship, I learned immensely about the beginning stages of archives and the work it takes to run an archive.

Most of the materials I worked with during my internship were digital and came from a multitude of formats. The Apollo Theater has offsite storage where most of the archival materials are being held including the original formats of a lot of the digital content, this included 1-inch reels, Beta tapes, and DVD/CD’s. During this time I was given about five boxes filled with DVDs and CDs and a long list of labels. This was my main project, the arrangement and inventorying of the Apollo Theater’s Disc Media collection. I sorted the discs by format, arranged them, applied catalog numbers, and rehoused any that may have needed it. Whenever I needed a break from my main project, I had several side projects that I worked on that were just as rewarding. I spent a lot of time going through thousands of digital photographs; identifying subjects, events, photographers, dates and more. Most of these photos were recent, from 2015 to 2019, however there were occasionally historical photos that were interesting to see. I was also given the side project of rehousing and organizing the program booklet collection, which was interesting to see the surviving program booklets that have shown up.

Interning at the Apollo Theater was a dream come true. I was able to see the pure passion of the archives profession all while gaining that passion myself. Before I left, I was shown the next projects that the archive had in store, which include newspaper advertisements of performers at the Apollo Theater and a collection of  promotional photos that had recently been found. The opportunity to work with the Apollo Theater was amazing and I can only hope that the archives continue to grow and the work I did helped.

Apollo Theatre’s collection of media (Photo Courtesy: Channy Jordan-Grier)

This past spring semester (2019), APH student Aki Snyder interned at the Intrepid Sea, Air, & Space Museum in New York City. Below you’ll find Aki’s blog post about her experience.

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Sitting on the Hudson River at Pier 86 is the imposing aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Intrepid. This Essex-class vessel weighs approximately 36,380 tons, measures 872

Photograph courtesy Aki Snyder

feet, and is able to carry 91-103 aircraft. The Intrepid was commissioned in 1943 and participated in the Pacific Theater of World War II. During her time in combat, she survived a torpedo strike and five kamikaze attacks! The Intrepid continued her service as a “cruise ship” during the Cold War, keeping tabs on the Soviets, and also saw combat in the Vietnam War. In addition to her military duties, during the 1960s, Intrepid served as a NASA recovery vessel. Intrepid was decommissioned in 1974. On August 4, 1982, the Intrepid, Sea, Air, & Space Museum opened to the public in New York City and has continued its mission to “promote the awareness and understanding of history, science and service through its collections, exhibitions and programming in order to honor our heroes, educate the public and inspire our youth.”

During my internship at the Intrepid, I processed their manuals collection. This collection consisted of 40 boxes containing a total of 679 manuals. This collection included manuals on every activity and item you could think of! I found medical manuals, weapons manuals (ex: how to use the torpedoes or how to use radar equipment), technical manuals (ex: how to fix the refrigerator or how to fix the movie projector), and even education manuals (ex: “Mathematics for Pilots” or “Physics for Pilots”). It was a very rich and interesting collection.

Photograph courtesy Aki Snyder

To complete my project, I went through all 40 boxes, noting what manuals we had and by using TMS (“The Museum System” —Intrepid’s database of their archival materials) I was able to determine what manuals were missing. Next step was assigning each manual a category depending on their naval assignment. Finally, once all of my manuals were correctly categorized, I created a finding aid. Finding aids are resources for researcher to provide a basic overview of a collection, record group, or series.

I loved my time at the Intrepid and I left having learned a lot about the archives profession. I enjoyed being able to apply the concepts I learned in “Introduction to Archives” in a real world setting. The Exhibits team, which I worked under, is fantastic! They are a wonderful group of hardworking individuals and eager to teach. My time at the Intrepid taught me how to effectively and efficiently process a collection, basic preservation techniques, the importance of good organization, and most important, how to write a finding aid! I was also fortunate enough to gain a crash course regarding how to use TMS and ArchiveSpace (open source information management platform that allows archives to manage their archival content online.