First Week

I started my internship at Indiana University's Office of University Archives and Records Management on Monday, January 11th. For the rest of the semester, I will be spending my Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings working under the supervision of the Photograph Curator, Brad Cook. Most of my previous archival experience is in processing collections containing few photographs, so this internship will give me an opportunity to learn more about working with photographs, slides, and negatives, as well as methods for digitizing those materials. My work will include pulling materials for researchers, scanning those materials, and adding metadata to digital images. I will also be learning about how to fulfill researcher requests for materials and how to handle requests for permission to publish images from the collections of the University Archives.

The Indiana University Archives photographs collections are located in an office one floor above the main office, so on Monday morning I headed upstairs, where Brad gave me a tour of the space and an orientation to the largest collections. The collections include photographs, slides, negatives, and reference prints for some of the negatives. I spent the rest of my time that day filing envelopes of photographs, reference prints, and negatives to familiarize myself with the location and organization of each of the main collections. I'll be spending a little time each day refiling these envelopes of materials requested by researchers.

On Tuesday, I started working on fulfilling my first request. Since the request came from a university department and is submitted every year, my supervisor gave me permission to write about it in some detail.

It came from the Indiana University Opera department, which requests images of previous opera productions each year in preparation for publicizing the upcoming season. After I located all the negatives that the department had asked for, Brad showed me how to scan them and use Photoshop to remove dust specks from the images. On Wednesday, I scanned and retouched the rest of the negatives myself. I loved the production of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) put on by Indiana University last November, so it was a treat for me to get to see images of previous productions. It looks like they've put on a lot of really fantastic shows!

The first week of my internship went really well, and I'm looking forward to my next! I think this internship will be fun and will provide me with some really great experience in an area of archival work that I know little about.