Today’s post is authored by Nic Caldwell, a second-year graduate student in the NYU/LIU Dual Degree program, pursuing a Masters in English Literature and an MLIS. Caldwell recently completed an ARL/SAA Mosaic Internship in Archival Collections Management.

As a Mosaic Intern, I have spent the past year interning with Archival Collections Management (ACM) on various projects from arranging physical and born-digital collections to editing finding aids. The Mosaic Fellowship program, which promotes diversity in the archives and special collections professions by providing professional development to scholars from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, has given me the opportunity to learn so much. The year has gone by so quickly, especially with holding time for my internship work along with classes and a second part time job. It has not always been easy, but I have gained so much experience from my year as an intern. I hope to share some of this knowledge with other students and interns working in the archives. After reflecting on my experience in ACM, I have come up with the things that I found most helpful during my internship. 

This post will be framed around my experience working on a website housing digital collections from the Tamiment repository. The project was a part of NYU Libraries’ ongoing efforts to ensure the accessibility of digital materials. The material included photographs, oral history interviews, videos, and sound recordings, some of which were minimally described. My work involved figuring out the best way to handle the digital materials to integrate them more with their finding aids. The end goal was to ensure that all finding aids were up to date and to determine which materials could remain on the website. The project introduced me to many concepts in archival work from copyright policy to media imaging, but also taught me three broad skills that I think are important for any student working in archives.

1. Setting Goals

The Mosaic program encouraged interns to create a learning plan to help map and track our goals. Creating a learning plan helped me begin to think about the experiences I felt would be most beneficial for me and how to communicate them with my internship coordinators. I was asked to list specific learning goals, as well as strategies for learning those skills, and methods for how my progress was to be evaluated. In writing my learning goals, I made both broad and specific goals. Some of my goals were more general to working in archives, such as “Learn DACS principles and how to apply them” and “Learn about inclusive description and access”. Some of my learning goals were concrete skills or programs that I wanted to learn – things like “Develop proficiency with ArchivesSpace” and “Learn born digital processing methodologies and workflows”. Along with setting goals, my supervisor and I developed strategies for achieving them like, “Participate in ACM projects about increasing discoverability and access to collections using linked data”. All together, this plan helped guide the types of projects that worked on. The website project, for example, allowed me to update Archivesspace records with guidance from my supervisor, learning about DACS principles and description. 

Something that I found invaluable throughout my internship was to set timelines, both long-term and short-term, for my goals.  At the very beginning of the internship, I set up timelines for my concrete goals, planning what I wanted to get accomplished during the year that I was with ACM. Before beginning the website project, I planned my projected timelines for each step, making sure they aligned with my long-term internship goals. This allowed me to manage my time and made large, multi-step projects seem less daunting. You might not be able to reach your goals/timelines every day or with every project, but having them there truly helps in the long run.

2. Checking In

I am the type of person that really appreciates feedback; it helps me learn and feel confident in my work. Early on in my work with ACM, I established a check-in system with my supervisor which allowed us to have a 30-minute meeting every two weeks to talk about my work and goals. My role on the website project involved working with multiple types of material and multiple departments throughout Bobst. Throughout the internship, I learned that helpful feedback can come not only from your supervisor but from many others. During my work on the website project, I had the opportunity to hear the Digital Accessibility Specialists from the Bobst Library User Experience (UX) team talk about accessibility standards for the library’s websites. I worked with the curators and archivists at Taminent in the Special Collections to learn more about the history and use of the materials. When I began arranging digital materials, I relied on the expertise of the Digital Archivist. As I was working with various material formats, I was able to attend training from the conservators at the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation & Conservation Department. 

I used these opportunities to ask questions about the greater workflows and projects being done in other departments. This gave me a better idea of all the skills, processes, and energy involved in sustaining NYU’s archives and made me feel like a part of the bigger picture. It also allowed me to lend my experience and perspective to other projects. Other benefits were that these conversations helped me get a better idea of what jobs and roles I might enjoy in my career as an archivist and gave me an idea of the labor that goes into making our services and collections accessible to students and researchers.

3. Finding Flexibility

An essential lesson that I learned throughout my internship, but much more so toward the end, was the importance of flexibility. Living, working, and attending school in New York CIty requires a lot of scheduling and at least some amount of schedule flexibility. Luckily, my internship was conveniently located in the same area that I take many of my classes. This allowed my schedule to be a bit more flexible — I could go from class to my internship, meet school project-mates for lunch during breaks, get some studying done after work — which allowed me to spend a couple days a week at home.   

This flexibility was really important near the end of my internship. Because of NYU’s closure as preventative measures for COVID-19, I was not able to work on-site for the last two months of my internship. This required a lot of flexibility from both me and ACM in multiple ways. The biggest roadblock was that I could not work on physical arrangement projects from home. The solution was to work with ACM to figure out what other projects I could do remotely that aligned with my goals. I ended up working on Web Archiving quality assurance, during which I learned principles and skills for an area of the field that I previously had no experience in. Another problem, which I realized early on in our switch to remote work, was that my schedule made it difficult to focus on both my now-online classes and my remote internship work. After speaking to my supervisor, I was able to rearrange my work hours so that I could be as focused as possible with the time that I had, while also juggling the switch from in-person learning to fully working and attending classes online. This plan allowed me to end my academic semester strong and end my internship with ACM with new skills. The past few months have shown me that we require flexibility to be able to do our best work.

Being flexible does not mean to forgo planning until the last minute — it was because of my learning goals that I was able to continue my internship remotely and still achieve many of my goals. However, being flexible does mean that things might not always go according to plan. What’s most important is what you learn along the way.  

Thank you to the Archival Collections Management and my fellowship mentor John Zarrillo for working with me this year, and to Mosaic Fellows Jasmine Sykes and Irmarie Fraticelli-Rodríguez for their feedback on this post.