Special Collections Internship at the University of Central Florida

Week 4: The Inside Scope of What I Do!

In this internship, I am learning how to be an archivist and what to expect if I want to specialize as a digital archivist. The Special Collections staff is small compared to other institutions so they do a little bit of everything. In other words, they do not necessarily concentrate on one task forever rather they work on the preservation of a collection and at the same time, they may work on digitization for another collection. From past blogs, I have mentioned that I have been organizing materials. Video 1 gives an overview of my daily tasks and my whereabouts. As a historian, this internship has exposed me to the ins and outs of what professional archivists do before I come in and do research. I am seeing it from another perspective, the back-story. In addition, the task I am doing will help me to adapt to places where the archival institutions are not organized so I have the skills needed to navigate and find the materials I am looking for in less resourceful settings. Not all places have all materials in the right location or may not have any archives, to begin with. Furthermore, I have been talking with David Benjamin, the department head and Burak Ogreten, Senior Archivist about reaching out again to Jose Guerra Alemán’s son and having a conversation with some questions on his father. This is another side of an archivist. An archivist can still be personable and can do oral interviews to expand one’s research. I hope that I can meet with him and find any new knowledge on Alemán that I can add to his biography. At the University of Central Florida Special Collections, I started the beginning stages of archival work and I do not have much of a specific direction for it has been untouched since it was brought in so I have the liberty to do what I think the organization should be and I am the only one who speaks Spanish so I have some jurisdiction of what certain materials should be written and translated in English or at least what documents can go where.

Video 1. Tour Around the Special Collections Area. (Video Courtesy of Samuel Ortiz.)

Beyond the language barriers between the collection and the staff, the University of Central Florida has been under renovation and has been changing the function of the floor around us. This is a rare, but interesting situation to be in. The reason is the bureaucracy and the amount of say one has as part of the working staff. One does not have much say on the color palette for the room, but one can make minor functional decisions. As an archivist at an institution, one will play many roles that are not just tasks related to one’s research, but ones that are different than one expects. For instance, the staff has to handle working under the changes in remodeling their area and in moving things around. Personally, the construction undergoing around us was a bit distractive and noisy. However, we get a chance for new development and expansion of the area. This adds the excitement of what the future brings and the amount of new space they are able to use. Changes are not all inefficient. I hope the institution can provide a growth of technology at the Special Collections and expand an emerging field called digital humanities. Can you imagine if the Alemán’s Collection can be interactive online and one can learn more than what the summary writes on it? I would propose to have a quantitative data on a number of notes on specific subjects he did throughout his life and present the data in a graph chart. For instance, the University of Virginia has a center of Sciences, Humanities and Arts Network of Technological Initiatives where scholars produce innovative, technological, and interactive ways to send their research or other important information. The faculty and staff have provided many tools to bring visualization as a means to be educational and interactive to all.