Throughout my internship experience with the National Collections Program at the Smithsonian Institution, I have been able to put to practical use a wide variety of the skills and knowledge that I acquired through the course of the graduate certificate program. These skills have largely focused on the areas of working collaboratively with others and presenting work online to a diverse audience. I have also found through my internship work, that there is a lot of behind the scenes elements to collections management that I was previously unaware of.
One of the main skills that was repeatedly emphasized throughout the different certificate courses, was the collaborative nature of digital humanities work. The ability to create larger scale projects through the combined efforts of individuals with different backgrounds and expertise is what makes digital humanities stand out as a field. I have been able to participate in and practice the skills of collaborative work first hand as a member of the working group putting together a collections based hazards flipbook based on the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. For me personally, this has been a new experience as I have never before worked on a project that consisted of many different individuals all contributing to one final product. I found that reading about collaborative projects and actually working on one are very different. For me personally, the readings I did as part of the various certificate courses did not give me a complete picture of what it would be like to work on a collaborative group project. I found that what worked best was to just jump into the project and that if I had any questions or concerns along the way to just ask.
The other main skill that I have used throughout the work I have done for my internship is how to present work online to a diverse audience. Another element of digital humanities that was emphasized throughout the course work, was having projects accessible online that can be accessed by diverse audiences. I have been able to put this skill to practical use through the creation of a collections based hazards flipbook that will be published on the National Collections Program’s website and accessible to the entire collections community. When I created my own digital humanities projects that I published online, my target audience was more flexible and as a result I had more flexibility with how I structured and presented my project. With the work for my internship, there is a very specific audience that the flipbook is intended for. As a result, the choices of how to best present the project online need to be carefully considered in order to make sure the flipbook reaches its desired audience.
The work I have done for my internship has also demonstrated to me that there is a lot of behind the scenes elements that go into the management of various collections. My internship project has taught me that there are a variety of different hazards that are associated with different collections types and that these hazards need to be carefully dealt with. I have found that for organizations like the Smithsonian, that a lot of proper care and effort goes into the maintenance of various collections. There are various teams, the National Collections Program that I am working with, whose job it is to make sure that the collections of the Smithsonian Institution are preserved for generations to come.
