Meet Our New AARL Archives Intern for Summer 2012

The AARL Archives Division hosts graduate interns who desire practical experience in special collections.  This year we have another dynamic student, Jessica Perkins Smith.  I asked her a few questions about her background and interests...

KCW:  What is your academic institution?

JPS:  Louisiana State University School of Library and Information Science.  I will graduate in December '12 with an MLIS, with an archives focus.

KCW:  Why did you select AARL as an internship site?

JPS:  I have a history and archival research background, and the Civil Rights movement has always been my main area of interest. Interning at Auburn Avenue is allowing me to work with collections that interest me, but I also knew that I would learn from the archivist here by getting great hands on experience in processing, writing finding aids, and helping researchers.

KCW:  What is your internship assignment/project?

JPS:  I am currently working on processing the papers of Atlanta attorney Donald L. Hollowell. Hollowell was instrumental in several prominent Civil Rights cases in Atlanta and throughout Georgia.

KCW:  What is the most interesting item you've handled?

JPS:  Hollowell represented Preston Cobb, the 15 year old African American teen convicted and sentenced to death for killing a white man in 1961 in Georgia. Hollowell succeeded in getting Cobb's execution stayed and, eventually his death sentence was commuted and Cobb served 18 years in prison. In processing Hollowell's papers I found correspondence between Hollowell and a Baltimore businessman, Abe Blumenthal, who had taken an interest in Preston Cobb's case and wanted to help. Blumenthal wanted to help Cobb continue his education while in prison and helped by sending money and writing Cobb letters.

Posted by Kerrie Cotten Williams, Archivist and Manager of the AARL Archives Division

Full Circle: Mentoring and Internship Programs in Archives

Pictured above is former AARL Archives Intern Maya Thomas, who processed the Charmayne Johnson family papers.

On Saturday, August 27th, Kerrie Cotten Williams and I participate on the panel "Fostering a Diverse Profession: Mentoring and Internship Programs," at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Chicago. We will be joined by Erika B. Castaño (University of Arizona), Steven D. Booth (National Archives and Records Administration), and former AARL intern Krystal Appiah.

Kerrie is moderating the panel, while I present about AARL's Archives Internship Program, which I coordinate and manage. As I prepare my presentation, I am reflecting on the role mentoring plays in the program. In Archival Internships: A Guide for Faculty, Supervisors, and Students -- one of the only texts on the subject -- authors Jeannette A. Bastian and Donna Webber write mentoring "may be the most valuable contribution that supervisors can make to an intern's education" (42). Though I'm still formalizing my ideas on "value" in the contexts of professional development, education, and ethics, I certainly agree with the authors that mentorship is a subject that deserves greater attention than it has received in professional literature.

As I continue to think about meaningful measures and outcomes for AARL's Archives Internship Program, it is gratifying to take pause and acknowledge the successes that former interns have achieved in a highly competitive job market. Towards the end of her internship, Krystal Appiah's blog entries caught the attention of the editor of the African American National Biography, who asked her to write an entry about Mary Parks Washington, which is now published. Since graduating from Brown University in May, she has kept busy as a participant in the HistoryMakers' Increasing African American Diversity in Archives Fellowship. Nicole Carmolingo, a major contributor to the blog, published an entry on Henry Rutherford Butler for the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Her second entry about the Big Bethel A.M.E. Church in Atlanta is forthcoming, and she recently began work fulltime as a project archivist in a for-profit setting. Another former intern, Rico Hall, just began the new Master of Archival Studies program at Clayton State University and is working on a special project at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

While I cannot take credit for their successes, I can say that mentorship plays an important role in AARL's Archives Internship Program. Here, informal conversations about the profession are common, and for interns who ask (and do good work), letters of recommendation and referrals are easy to come by. We intentionally foster a supportive environment for discovery, exploration, and dialog because the intern and mentor relationship is reciprocal and mutually beneficial. All the time and energy comes back full circle.

Posted by Wesley Chenault, Library Research Associate

(Public) Humanities + Archives = Activating the Cultural Footprint

I recently finished a ten-week internship in the Archives Division at the Auburn Avenue Research Library as part of my master’s program in Public Humanities at Brown University. I am frequently asked about public humanities and its relationship to the work of archives.

The humanities are comprised of subject areas that analyze, interpret, and reflect on the human condition. According to the 1965 legislative act that created the National Endowment for the Humanities, the humanities are “branches of scholarly and cultural activity … [that help us] achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.” These include the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art history and theory, ethics, history, language, literature, jurisprudence, philosophy, and religion.

While university professors and writers are obvious examples of humanists, the interdisciplinary field of public humanities supports the tools and spaces to incorporate a wider group of participants into this sphere. This is reflected in the work of my fellow students, who connect with community historians, schoolchildren, farmers, teenaged Civil War re-enactors, and others in sites as diverse as museums, archives, rural farms, dance studios, national parks, community art centers, neighborhood porches, and cyberspace.

Public humanities recognizes that the general public is an active creator, and not merely a consumer, of humanities. Thus, public humanities also serves as a vehicle for civic engagement for all members of a community. As Thomas Ehrlich writes in Civic Responsibility and Higher Education, “Civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.”

My summer internship gave me many opportunities to promote the “knowledge, skills, values, and motivation” for civic engagement through the humanities. Processing the Mary Park Washington Papers and creating the collection finding aid allowed me to provide access to Washington’s vast knowledge of African American art and artists, her process as an artist commenting on history and society, and the documentation of her civic engagement as an arts educator and advocate.

I also launched social media initiatives for the Archives Division, creating a Twitter account and this blog, and expanding the Archives’ presence on Facebook. In addition to providing a forum for sharing our collections, social media helps us communicate with our users and donors, allowing us to learn about their priorities, knowledge, and needs. One example was the post on behalf of Dr. Barbara McCaskill, seeking community knowledge about photographer J. Richardson Jones. Social media also helps potential donors (maybe you!) see the far-reaching impact of archives and the importance of donating their papers to an institution such as AARL.

Thanks to the AARL’s collaborative relationship with cultural heritage and humanities organizations in Atlanta, I was also able to work on a special project for the Georgia Humanities Council, in support of their initiative to promote civic reflection on issues of race. Last year, the GHC organized a town hall meeting for the initiative, demonstrating how ordinary people can use their knowledge of morality, history, and philosophy to reflect on ways to improve their communities. Using the insights raised in this town hall meeting as well as my knowledge of Atlanta’s history gained from working in AARL’s Archives Division, I formulated discussion questions and a reading list that will hopefully help stimulate similar discussions in community groups across Georgia.

The interconnectedness of the Archives Division’s staff, collections, donors, collaborators and community of users invigorates the humanities and promotes civic engagement. My internship reinforced the power of archives to help the public use, build upon, and share diverse forms of cultural knowledge in order to improve community life. Janice Sikes-Rogers, an AARL librarian, calls this process “activating the cultural footprint.” How do you see the Archives Division as your partner in activating the cultural footprint?

Posted by Krystal Appiah, Brown University

Research 2.0

This post launches another series, Research 2.0, which will address traditional and emerging ideas and practices related to research in the digital age.  

One of the greatest frustrations I encountered as a genealogical researcher twenty years ago concerned access to vital statistics and other records. Travel outside of my locale was not only difficult, but not an option. Later, as a graduate student, most of my research involved reviewing records on microfilm and requesting books through interlibrary loan. Now technological advances allow researchers to access resources online, sometimes from the comfort of home. Times have changed.

During the summer of 2010, I participated in an Advanced Archives Practicum hosted by the Auburn Avenue Research Library for the University of West Georgia. In addition to assisting with processing the James Bryant Smith Collection, I conducted research for entries on Drs. Eliza A. Grier and Henry Rutherford Butler that will be submitted to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Whether you are tracing your family’s history or conducting research, the availability of online digital collections and databases opens doorways to information that once seemed difficult to find and was time consuming to research.

The life of Dr. Eliza A. Grier provides one example. Grier was the first African American woman to receive a license to practice medicine in Georgia in 1897, following her graduation from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (now Drexel University College of Medicine) that year. News of her licensure traveled as far west as Utah and as far north as New York. Grier’s career as a doctor of obstetric and gynecological medicine ended abruptly, however, when she fell ill in 1901 and later died in 1902. All of this information I found with ease in online databases of historic newspapers and through digital collections. (Pictured left is a graduation program from Fisk University, where Grier graduated in 1891. She later attend the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Courtesy of AARL.)


Another example is that of Dr. Henry Rutherford Butler, Sr, who practiced general and pediatric medicine in Atlanta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the first African Americans to receive a medical license in Georgia, Butler and a former classmate, Dr. Thomas Heathe Slater, owned and operated the Butler and Slater Drug Store, the first pharmacy in Atlanta that catered to African Americans. Additionally, Butler served as a Grand Master of the Prince Hall Affiliation of Masons for the State of Georgia. Again, this brief biographical sketch was obtained from information found in online databases and collections and in a relatively short amount of time.  (Pictured right is a Father's Day card given to Butler from his son, Henry Rutherford Butler, Jr, in 1927. Courtesy of AARL.)

For researchers, times have truly changed – and for the better.

Posted by Sarah Middlemast, University of West Georgia

Ostriches + summer interns, part 2

What’s the connection between South African ostriches and summer interns? For the purpose of this post, it’s Krystal Appiah (pictured above), a Brown University graduate student and former summer intern in the Archives Division at the Auburn Avenue Research Library. Had she been here last week when Anita Martin, Library Associate, inventoried issues of the Penny Magazine from a recent acquisition, Appiah would have delighted in the mid 19th century publication of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a London-based organization, and would have written an engaging, well-researched post about the aim of the publication, its intended readership, and the racialized political economy of British colonization and its affects on Africa. Alas, Appiah completed the internship and returned to Providence, Rhode Island.

That post is forthcoming, but for now Appiah’s departure offers an opportunity to reflect on the benefits of internships to interns, host institutions, and beyond. In Archival Internships: A Guide for Faculty, Supervisors, and Students – one of the few resources on the subject – authors Jeannette A. Bastian and Donna Webber write that internships have the potential to be “transformative, revelatory, and life expanding” (p. 20). While Archival Internships is written from the perspective of academic institutions, much of it can be tailored to government, corporate, and non-profit settings. Done well, internship programs can go far beyond course requirements or attractive resume add-ons for interns and, conversely, a simple means to get the tedious and mundane completed for host sites.

As a public research library specializing in the use and preservation of unique materials related to African and African American culture and history, AARL’s “public” varies in myriad ways as does the backgrounds and parent institutions of its interns. For the past two years, AARL has partnered with the International Rescue Committee’s Youth Futures Internship Program, working with Clarkston High School (Decatur, GA) students, some of whom are originally from Burma, Mexico, and Nepal. We host interns from the Georgia Archives Institute, as well as students from several Atlanta metropolitan colleges and universities, including Emory University, Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Georgia State University, Kennesaw State University, Morehouse College, and more. This summer, we welcomed our first out of state intern, Krystal Appiah, who literally transformed the Archives Division, giving it a welcomed “social media make-over.” That wasn’t the only change for the better.

Appiah made the very most of her time, attending library programs, assisting staff in other divisions with professional projects, visiting archivists at neighboring institutions, working with the Georgia Humanities Council, and, as a result of her post on Mary Parks Washington, catching the attention of the executive director of the African American National Biography, who asked that she submit an entry on Washington. Framed another way, that’s one intern, one university, a public research library, a state humanities council, and a publisher brought together over a relatively short amount of time through one arrangement that, at a very basic level, is designed to provide one party with a little hands-on experience and the other a free (or almost free) set of hands to work on day-to-day activities.

Archival internship programs, then, are and can be so much more. They can foster inter-institutional relationships, encourage interdisciplinary dialogues, and facilitate transnational cultural awareness and understanding. In so doing, they can create the conditions for the life expanding, the revelatory, and the transformative noted by Bastian and Webber.

Returning to the Penny Magazine, isn’t that the purpose of useful knowledge?


Works Cited:
Bastian, Jeannette A. and Donna Webber. Archival Internships: A Guide for Faculty, Supervisors, and Students. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2008.

Posted by Wesley Chenault, Library Research Associate

South African ostriches + summer interns

If you are wondering what South African ostriches and summer interns have to do with one another, good. We have your attention. However, we will not share that information until next week, when certain individuals return from the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), held this year in Washington, DC. Packed with dynamic and informative guest speakers, panels, sessions, presentations, and more, "ARCHIVES*RECORDS" is being held as a joint meeting of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA), National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA), and SAA. To our colleagues from the Society of Georgia Archivists who are presenting, we wish you good luck!

Posted by Kerrie Cotten Williams, Archivist, and Wesley Chenault, Library Research Associate

Archives and Publics: Handling History

Archives preserve collections of documents, records, and manuscripts that hold some level of historical interest. This can include documents of national importance, such as the Declaration of Independence, down to a local company’s financial records. However, one of the most interesting types of collections that can be found in an archives is that of the common person. As an archivist-in-training, I have the opportunity to access these pieces of history as well as to learn how to handle them and preserve them properly. According to fellow intern Sarah Warren, that is why she chose the archival field of history as her career path. “I realized that I have the chance to maintain documents, letters, and photographs,” she notes. “To have direct contact with personal stories as a full-time job seemed too good to be true.” By training how to be archivists and public historians, we can organize these documents created by everyday people and give them a value and voice that they may not have otherwise. (Right: photographs, Archives Division, AARL.)

Archival study can serve as a branch of public history because, as archivists, we are trained to preserve historical documents for public access. We learn preservation and processing techniques and put them to practical use in the public forum so that researchers can use these historical items for years to come. Archives serve a similar purpose as a museum: they maintain documents of the past for the benefit of the present and future. Shannon Danielle Smith, another University of West Georgia intern, considers the idea of “putting history into practice in the public field, rather than inside a classroom” the best part of being a historian.

The University of West Georgia’s Public History Program gives both undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to take classes and learn how best to present historical information to the public. We are trained not only to teach, but also to interpret and exhibit. Graduate students have the opportunity to earn a Museum Studies Certificate, which offers classes in conjunction with the Atlanta History Center and trains in all aspects of museum careers: exhibits, collections, administration, and education. The archival branch of the public history program offers courses in basic theory and management as well as an advanced practicum, which offers hands-on experience in the Archives Division at the Auburn Avenue Research Library. Through classes, internships, and research assistantships, we have the chance to work directly within our field so that we are prepared to pursue a career in promoting history to the public in museum and archival settings.

Through graduate internships, I have had access to rare books and artifacts that I never thought I would have access to. An education in archival and historical preservation involves handling history in a way that not only enriches our studies but also our passion for history. Archives offer direct contact with history itself, whether it includes perusing a personal collection like that of James Bryant Smith, or researching the Georgia Political Heritage Collection at the University of West Georgia. Entering the professional field of public history means that I will get to share that passion with the general population on both local and national levels. The work that I am being trained to do behind the scenes creates an accessible way for the public to interact with history on a hands-on, personal level that reaches beyond looking at a museum exhibit through plated glass. (Left: rare book by Phillis Wheatley, Archives Division, AARL.)

Posted by Tiffany Luoma, University of West Georgia Intern