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HIST 2950 Archival Internship

Use this guide to complete the archival internship components of your HIST 2950 course.

Archives: Their Organization and Philosophy

Archival Jobs:

  • Processing archivists: these folks take boxes of stuff, sort it, wrap the items up for long-term storage, and then describe the items so we can all find them again.
  • Accessioning archivists: these folks analyze their organization's collections and then go out looking for new items to add to the collection so that their institution can give researchers access to the most information possible on a single topic.
  • Reference archivists: these folks help researchers find items and also put together displays of collections.

Archival Principles:

  • Archivists aren't historians, their goal isn't to discover historical stories. Their goal is to ensure that knowledge gets preserved and passed on for future generations to analyze. This is why finding aids aren't very descriptive of the contents of their folders.
  • Archivists focus on keeping fonds (group of documents on 1 topic) together. Essentially they try not to compete with one another. This helps researchers as it reduces the fragmentation of topics.
  • Archivists focus on the ethics of what they collect. They ask if someone would be harmed by their collections:
    • Most collections are closed until the individuals involved are dead (and some are even closed until the children of the original creator are dead).
    • Most archivists don't collect information on individuals that could be linked to criminal activity (this would endanger an individual).

Archival Collections

Many institutions create archives to store their records. State entities do this to store information about their employees and to document actions undertaken on behalf of the state. Private entities do this to record or memorialize their work (or to document a cause they care about). Most archives are stored on different websites.

Library of Congress

The library of congress collects records related to the United States. Some of these records have been digitized and some records are only available if you visit the archive in-person. 

Archival Collections on a Global Scale

While there are many different archival websites, if you want to search for a specific type of content you have two main options:

  1. Use prior knowledge of institutions to search a specific archive's collection for contents related to your research area.
  2. Test out some Google searches on your topic with the words "archive," "digital archive," "digital collection" included.
  3. Search for collections related to your research area using ArchiveGrid.