This past spring semester (2019), APH student Greg Ferguson interned at the CUNY TV’s Library and Archives in New York City. Below you’ll find Greg’s blog post about his experience.

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For my internship, I worked on open source digital preservation software at CUNY TV’s Library and Archives. The Archives maintain the station’s digital repository holding all of its programming as well as the Himan Brown Radio collection, which contains content digitized from audio tapes and playscripts donated by the family of the noted radio drama producer Himan Brown.

To manage the intake and storage of all of this digital content, the Archives rely on its own internally developed open source software. The code is organized in modular microservices, which are short pieces of code designed to accomplish specific tasks. Individual microservices are strung together to build more complex processes that automate the ingest of various file formats along with preservation metadata and derivative service and access copies.

The Archives’ software was developed from the digital preservation application Archivematica, which offers a lightweight open source option for digital archiving in line with the OAIS  reference model.

My objectives were to work on the microservices for audio and image files to make them more robust and less narrowly tailored to the Archives’ local workflows. To accomplish this, I used a suite of tools including the text editor Textmate, the version control application Github and Apple’s Terminal command line interface to edit and test the station’s code. As I had no previous experience with coding, I relied on my supervisors for advice and instruction and ultimately succeeded in making several improvements to the code, including:

• Replacing MP3 files with M4A files for audio podcasting (M4A files offer superior sound at lower bitrates/file sizes, making them ideal for podcasts)
• Optimizing PDF settings to produce color access files smaller than the previous monochrome files, without impeding OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
• Embedding descriptive pbcore metadata (title, creator, date, etc.) in access files for display in iTunes and Adobe Acrobat
• Testing the audio and image microservices to ensure they will work on files at other organizations without CUNY-specific attributes such as CUNY filenames or metadata
• Automatically producing quality control reports for newly digitized audio files to identify problems like dead air, phase issues or bad levels.

As someone with no previous experience with coding, this experience was very challenging but also very rewarding. It was an especially good experience after already taking the program’s Digital Archives course. The internship gave me the opportunity to see things up close that we learned about in Digital Archives, including: the OAIS model, the DCC Curation Lifecycle model (especially the value of active preservation planning), the architecture of microservice software, and the open source ethos.

Code for embedding pbcore metadata into audio files (Photo Courtesy: Greg Ferguson)

This past spring semester (2019), APH student Emma Gyorgy interned with the Frederick A.O. Schwarz Education Center at the Museum of the City of New York in New York City. Below you’ll find Emma ’s blog post about his experience.

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This semester I had the opportunity to intern with the Frederick A.O. Schwarz Education Center at the Museum of the City of New York. I spent my time at MCNY working on a variety of projects with the Education Center team. Some areas of focus were professional development events for educators, New York City History Day, and school programs.

Me conversing with a character from the exhibit A City for Corduroy: Don Freeman’s New York (Photograph courtesy Emma Gyorgy)

An educator took this photo of me during a professional development day, in a session on photography. I’m conversing with a character from the exhibit A City for Corduroy: Don Freeman’s New York

One of my first experiences with professional development at the Museum was during Breaking Boundaries, an educator day based on the exhibit In the Dugout with Jackie Robinson. This day was helpful to keep in mind as a reference during my work with professional development throughout the rest of the semester. I helped with the preparation for professional development events. Sometimes that meant researching potential session leaders for the annual Teaching Social Activism Conference, other times it meant running across Central Park to buy art supplies for an educator workshop. When an event is happening, all hands are on deck.

I continued to learn about event planning through my work on New York City History Day. The Museum hosts the New York City event for National History Day, where middle and high school students present history projects that examine the designated theme through a variety of formats and topics. The theme for 2019 was Triumph and Tragedy, and on New York City History Day I was able to experience the excitement of the hundreds of students who came to present their work. I had a deeper appreciation for the day because of my work helping to prepare the judging rubrics and student materials in the weeks leading up to New York City History Day. The day went off without a hitch, which was a reflection of the staff’s careful planning and long hours.

Question cards I designed for groups who arrive early to the Museum for a school program (Photograph courtesy Emma Gyorgy)

The Education Center leads school programs every weekday—in 2018 they welcomed over 50,000 students to the Museum. I assisted staff with school programs by sending confirmation emails for upcoming programs and stocking supplies for programs. I also took on a project to help fill a need at the Museum. School groups sometimes arrive early for their programs, and the Education Center was looking for an activity to keep groups engaged before their program. After several conversations with Joanna Steinberg, Senior Education Manager at the Museum, I decided to create a set of question cards for older students, and a set of image cards for younger students. The question cards feature New York City trivia, and questions that ask students to discuss their own experiences in the city. The image cards feature historic photos of iconic New York City sites from the MCNY collection, and students are asked to identify the familiar places.

I feel very fortunate to have interned with the Education Center at MCNY. I was able to see the behind the scenes magic of how the education team makes creative programming happen, and I look forward to returning to MCNY as a part-time educator in the fall.