Merry Wanderer of the Night:
internships

Last Friday was my last day at the State Historical Society. I logged about 100 hours over the course of the summer, and I learned a lot. I started my internship there because I was considering becoming an archivist. After spending a whole summer there I decided that archives are probably not the vein of library science I want to pursue. There are a couple of reasons why.

The first reason is that it seemed like the archivists at the State Historical Society didn't have a whole lot of interaction with the public. They handled queries but most of our queries came in through phone or email. I think at first I was attracted to the field of archives because it wasn't with a lot of people interaction, but after spending the summer there I realized that I actually like people (I know, I was amazed too).

Another reason is that archivists have to spend ridiculous amounts of time on stupid projects that are not interesting at all. I know all librarians have to deal with boring stuff but the project I was working on this summer was humongous. Three of us were working on it and one of the archivists came in one the weekends to work and when I left they informed me they were about half done. Some of the stuff we got in had no historical significance at all. Like Christmas cards. They might be important to the person who gave them to us, although I doubt it because otherwise he probably wouldn't have given them to us. Basically, the archives kind of seem like a landfill.

Overall, I enjoyed my time at the State Historical Society and I am so glad I tried out archives because now I know what the job is actually like. This was my first internship and I'm only halfway through school so I still have time to try out a lot of other jobs. My time was not wasted at all, I learned a lot about the process and just about libraries and archives in general, and I came away with a personal decision that it wasn't for me. I say my first internship was a success.

This was a really surreal and personal week for me at my internship. It was probably my favorite week there because I found so many things that were interesting to me. I also rediscovered Gong Fu Tea and spent a ridiculous amount of money there, not that much really but a lot for tea. On Tuesday I went through the personal papers collection I am processing and found almost an entire box devoted to AIDS in Iowa from the 1980's. I found this extremely fascinating especially since anyway who knows me knows I go absolutely crazy for Angels in America by Tony Kushner. AIDS wasn't a huge deal for me growing up since I was born in 1990 in rural Iowa, but I do remember hand-outs and different things about what kids in my class weren't supposed to do to protect ourselves from AIDS. And I remember learning about it later in elementary school and how it could actually be dangerous and some of the reasons why. I, of course, didn't learn about the breakout until later in high school, and I don't think I really understood the weight of AIDS until I read Angels in America.

But this box was amazing. I don't think I've ever really considered what AIDS was like in Iowa, it seems like something that happened far away in New York or California. But that's not really true, it did effect Iowa. The materials I found belonged to an insurance company and it was obvious they were concerned about what AIDS meant for insurance. Some people didn't think those with AIDS should have insurance or couldn't be insured for their illness. It was really enough to make you sick reading some of the different comments people made. I think I looked at the box for about 45 minutes and it was an eye opening experience.

But nothing was as eye opening as yesterday. I had a little down time after finishing a box of death certificates and I decided to go in the system and see if I could find any of my relatives. I check three counties and in the last one I looked at there were two people with my last name. The county was the county my dad and grandfather grew up in so I just nodded and thought that made sense, then I went on to my other work not thinking much about it. I texted my dad to let him know, and he sent me a text back asking if they died of natural causes. I said I thought so but since I didn't really look that well I couldn't be sure. I returned to find that one was a baby girl who lived only a day, and the other was a six-year-old girl. I found out that the baby girl was actually my grandpa's sister, and when I looked at the maiden name I recognized it as my great-grandmother's maiden name. My great-grandmother died this past fall and I remember hearing that she had a daughter who died but I didn't make the connection until my dad said it. It was just amazing to me that I work in this place every week and then here sitting in front of me is a little piece of my own past. That was really special to me.

It's been a while since I did an update on my summer internship at the State Historical Society of Iowa. This is for a few reasons. 1. I've worked kind of irregularly the past few weeks due to a dentist appointment and a scrape with a cold. 2. It didn't even seem like there was enough to write a whole post about. So now I'm going to write about the past three weeks at my internship. If you haven't read any of these posts until now I'll let you know what I'm doing. I work in the archives at the state historical society and go through personal papers of a former governor and then put them into the computer. I also take death certificates from the 1920's and enter them into the computer.

Awhile ago I mentioned I had found death certificates from 1928 where a man had shot his wife and three-year-old child. Well a couple weeks after that I was going through death certificates again, still in 1928 and saw a name I thought looked familiar. "It's the husband," I thought, and started to enter everything in. Then I looked at the dates and realized it couldn't possibly be the husband, because this person was only five years old. I was right though, he had been shot by his father (the same man from the first set of death certificates). I went to the next one and saw a girl with the same last name. A three-month-old girl shot by her father. And then finally, the man himself. Killed himself. Why wasn't this man in jail? How did he manage to pull this off? What provoked him to shoot his wife, three children, and then himself? It's a horrible story, but I have to know what happened so I'm thinking about going to the State Historical Library and seeing if there is anything about in the microfilm. I have to satisfy my curiosity!

The closer I get to 1930, the more suicides I see. It's depressing, but incredibly interesting from a historical standpoint. Most of the deaths are see are just "normal" deaths, but lately it's seemed like 1/15 have been suicides... and this is in a small town. I'm almost done with the 20's in this county and I'm amazed that I've gone through about ten years of history for this place in just seven weeks. If I had it my way, I would probably spend all of my time indexing death certificates, but the other project I'm working on is huge and they really need help with it. One of the state archivists teased me last week though. She said, "You know you've been here too long when death certificates become a nice break."

I really am amazed that I've been working in this place for almost two months. I've enjoyed my time in the archives, but I want to try out several other forms of library science before I go to library school. In the fall I start a job in the preservation department at the University of Iowa, which will be sort of related to what I do now. I'd like to get a job in a public library next summer.

It's hard to believe I've already been working on my internship for a month. This week was by far the most fun and interesting week I've had yet. I'm pretty shy, but I feel like I have finally broken out of my shell a little bit at work and have been talking to my coworkers quite a bit. There was a retirement party and potluck on Tuesday for a bunch of people I didn't know, but all of us archives people sat together and chatted. There was a volunteer there as well who used to work in the archives. That seems to be a common thing at the State Historical Society. People retire, but then they come back as volunteers. I think that is a pretty good sign that they like their jobs. Thursday we all went to lunch at this place downtown called Lucca and I had an awesome (and slightly strange) sandwich. Brie provolone, mayo, and vegetables.

On Tuesday I also got a bit of a tour of the State Historical Society. It's weird that I've been there so many times but never realized how much behind the scenes action there is. I went to the reading room, which was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be, and met the reference librarian up there. The reading room still has a card catalog! That was about enough to make me SQUEE. I also met an archivist who worked with photographs and a few other people. It took some time out of my day and was a nice break from the usual going through boxes.

But I did find some weird stuff in the boxes this week. To name one, I find a mask that was made out of a photograph of a person's face and then cut out and attached to a rubber band. I pulled it out and asked everyone else if they knew who the guy was since I figured he was probably some political guy (the boxes I'm going through I related to politics) but no one knew who he was. It's a mystery. I also found this lovely cartoon (excuse the bad cell phone picture).

It wasn't all fun and games though. I did end up finding two of the worst death certificates I'd seen so far. It was a twenty-five-year-old woman who was shot by her husband. The next certificate was a man's name so I figured it was the husband killing himself. No. He shot his three-year-old son. Ugh, I felt sick when I saw that.

This week I finally reached the end of the personal papers I have been working with. At least, I thought I had. Then they brought out three more boxes for me. The archivists at the State Historical Society have been working on this project for months and from what I can tell there is no end in sight. That's the thing about archives, just when you think you've reached the end, there are still more and more boxes to go through. Just so you understand exactly how time consuming all of this is, I thought I'd talk about what processing an archival collection actually entails.

Basically what happens is the archives get boxes from various sources. What is inside the boxes we don't entirely know. So what happens first (this happened before I came) is one of the archivists just sweeps through all of the boxes and comes up with a general sense of what the box contains. Are they materials from a department in a college? Are they materials for the Peace Institute? And so on. Then they create a list of what these boxes might have in them and possibly a list of subjects that the boxes could contain (in my experience one box usually has multiple subjects). What I then do is go through each item in the box and get a better sense of what the box has in it, including the stuff we don't really want to keep like Christmas cards. Yes, I have found Christmas cards. I go through and read letters, get a sense for what the project actually was, what the time period it took place in is, and what is in the box that might not fit with the box but might fit with a different collection. I then get to do a lot of data entry which is quickly becoming my favorite thing in the world.

You would think after all of this we would be done. But no, then we have to meet and talk about what we went to keep and later we will actually organize the collection, move it from filing boxes to archival boxes, and then we'll have to create a finding aid for the collection. Phew! I'm tired just thinking about all of that. The fact that it takes so much time to process collections, and the fact that archives are available for more than just collections processing (people actually use those collections you know) is why archives are almost always horribly backed up. It's a fact of life.

In other news, I went through a year and a half of death certificates yesterday. One I found with no name, no parents names, and no birth date. I thought to myself, "What the hell is up with this one?" Then I looked at the description of death. It was a baby found in an outhouse with a piece of paper stuck in it's mouth. I got stuck on that one for awhile, trying to imagine why something like that would have happened. Did she not want the baby? Did her husband not want the baby? Maybe she got pregnant young and couldn't keep the baby. So many stories flashed through my mind. But eventually I had to move on. Later I saw another one that caught my interest. The man had fallen down an elevator shaft. These were both in 1926.

This week I finally got to put my notes into Microsoft Access rather than write them on a legal pad. I love legal pads, but I found I made much more specific notes when I was working on the computer because there were actual fields for me to fill out. Working with the personal papers is pretty interesting, but I don't know about so much of the stuff sometimes it can be frustrating. And some of the files are just repeats of letters addressed to different people, but I don't know that's all that is in there until I go through the entire file. I think I mentioned this last week, but I find the death certificates a lot more interesting. Today I actually started to see the same names repeated. I saw what I assumed was the grandfather in the family died from a heart attack, and then a few months later his 18-year-old grandson died in an automobile accident. This was actually really interesting, because the death year was 1924 so cars were fairly new at that point. I'm sure it was a really scary experience for the family when they realized how dangerous cars actually were.

This is an example of a Canadian death certificate, which I obviously don't work with, but it gives you an idea of the kind of fun I have deciphering handwriting!

I worked by myself quite a bit this week, but I'm getting to know my coworkers a little bit more. Today I went out to lunch with all of them to a great Greek restaurant downtown. Afterward we went to an antique shop called Found Things where I spotted a table I kind of want to buy. I really like the idea of just leaving in the middle of the day for an hour and visiting some of your favorite places in downtown Des Moines. The State Historical Society is at a great location with quite a few neat restaurants and shops near it. On Tuesday I went to a used bookstore that I pass on my way to work, but I was sadly disappointed with the selection. And for how little they did have I thought they were incredibly overpriced. Maybe I'm just spoiled by The Haunted Bookshop in Iowa City. They are extremely fair in their pricing.

Speaking of Iowa City, today I was going through University of Iowa brochures from the 1980's and I just couldn't help but get lost in them for about an hour. I almost started crying when I saw all of these familiar places that I miss so much. I really do miss Iowa City and I think I'm starting to annoy my parents with talking about it all the time. On the bright side, that is one of the great things about working in the archives. It's so easy to get lost in a file and try to put together the story of what exactly did happen. It seems like I find at least one thing every day that I'm fascinated by. I'm taking a little notebook with me to work to jot down some of the most interesting ones, and then I try to look up more information about them later.

Check out my post from week one if you haven't already.

So after much debating I decided to just write about what I know this summer, and what I know about right now is being an intern. I have an unpaid internship with the State Historical Society of Iowa this summer working in the archives and this was my first week. I applied for a few different paid internships but none of them were quite the right fit for me, and with the economy it's harder than ever for us liberal arts kids to find paying internships. Since I'm not getting paid I'm working ten hours a week right now, on two different days. Even though I'm not getting paid I still think I'm getting valuable experience, in addition to building contacts and references.

My first day on the job I was given four boxes and after hearing a little background information on the collection they told me to set out. Set out?!?! I had no idea what I was doing! I still don't! So right now I'm basically sifting through a collection of personal papers and making a list of what the collection contains. I got pretty bored with that after four hours on Tuesday, but today I came across something really interesting. About ten years ago in Iowa there was a real push to get an inmate out of the women's prison in my hometown of Mitchellville, Iowa. I became extremely engrossed in old newspaper articles about her as well as letters vying for or against her release. I tried to find something about it on the Internet when I got home today, but so far I haven't found any luck. It was a nice way to spend a half hour today though; it felt like getting lost in a really good book.

A little later I got set up on the computer network and got to start indexing death certificates from 1924. This sounds morbid and it is, but it's also extremely interesting. In the fifty or so certificates I indexed today I found that most of the people who dyed were one-year-old or younger, or over the age of seventy. It seems like if you could just get past that one year you would live a very long life. There were unfortunately quite a few suicides in the batch I went through, mostly retired farmers and the things they would kill themselves with were just... ugh. Carbolic acid was a favorite. The most challenging part of indexing the death certificates is trying to read the doctor's handwriting! Every once in awhile you'll come across one that is typed and that is the best part of the day.

Have any of you worked in or with an archive? What was your first internship?