2020 Internship Blog Post #13

         This week, working from home on my internship with the UCF Special Collections and University Archives, I have been focused on completing the Excel spread sheet for the STARS website. I am nearly finished with the spread sheet. The building inventory sheet was in numerical order, which makes sense, instead of alphabetical order. Consequently, I was having to go back and add buildings I had missed. It is quite interesting what a totally different job at an internship at Special Collections and University Archives entails. I am enjoying getting the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of multiple jobs at this internship. It is a very different experience working from home on an internship, but it is the new normal I suppose as we are doing this for classes and most everyone has to work from home now as well. I do enjoy working on all of my school work and my internship from home; I just wish it was under better circumstances. I am lucky that I will be doing a research internship with Dr. French this summer working with digital tools online. I have learned a lot this semester and this academic year. As far as academics and historical preservation and digital tools go, I truly believe it is critically important that we have a happy medium and balance between print and digital. What I mean by this is that currently we have very little access to our university library. I can’t even go in for my internship but people are still able to get books. I think book, documents, manuscripts, and photos still need to be preserved in archives, special collections, historical societies, and libraries for people to access. However, I do also think it is immensely important in times like we are currently experiencing to have access to digital tools that give us access to these records easily. 
            It crosses my mind that perhaps digital tools do have their limits and at times fail. I also think we pay too much importance to print or digital forms of publication and I think it is this middle ground where we can find what we need. This academic year has been quite an interesting one, from a hurricane that did not hit Orlando but devastated the lives of countless people in the Caribbean to now coronavirus to learning a great deal academically. It has been quite an interesting ride here at UCF my first year. This weekend I should be able to finish up the Excel spread sheet and send it over to my supervisor for her to look over. I will also hopefully begin working on some of the history bios of some of the buildings on the spread sheet. I keep changing my mind of which buildings I want to write on. This week, I think I am going to do the parking structures since only one of them currently has a completed bio on it. First though, I think I am going to start with the UCF President’s House because that is very interesting to me and must have a very interesting history. I want to do this history bio the most so my supervisor told me to start with this one. I am not sure if I will end up doing the parking garages, as I might do something else that I find as I finish up and double check the spread sheet that peaks my interest as a scholar with a love of history. I will however write the many bios I need to complete in order to get the hours I need to finish my internship. Next week, I will discuss which bios I have begun writing. The last thing I wanted to say is that I am excited to see where this digital age takes us as historians, public historians, archivists, librarians, museum curators, and directors, but we should not forget what is important, where we came from. It is also important to continue to preserve print publications, photos, and artifacts, as, in a way, museums, libraries, historical societies, archives, and special collections are all sacred spaces for history and its continual preservation, which we discussed in Introduction to Public History.

The University of Central Florida Special Collections and University Archives Website:

https://library.ucf.edu/about/departments/special-collections-university-archives/

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