My Internship at the Massachusetts Historical Society
During my senior year at college, I finally reached a point where I had to decide what I was going to do with my B.A. in history. Then, my mom offered a suggestion I'd never thought of before: what about being a librarian? As I began to explore this career possibility, I learned more about archives, and, through a tip from a Tufts University archivist, wound up with an internship at the Massachusetts Historical Society. I enjoyed my time in the collections services department and decided to get my masters degree in library science at Simmons College. Last year, I was lucky enough to get another internship in the collections services department as part of one of my Simmons classes, and this semester, I came back for more! This time, I worked in the reader services department answering researchers' reference questions.
Getting a taste of public services in an archives has been extremely valuable and a great complement to my behind-the-scenes experiences. It's rewarding to help people directly and see the immediate results of one's work. However, being in direct contact with researchers has its added pressures. For example, I received one question about how slavery ended in Massachusetts that I spent half a day on but still could not find the answer. Despite the frustration, the search for the answer was educational for me because I learned a ton about the end of slavery in Massachusetts. As a plug, an especially great resource was the Massachusetts Historical Society's online exhibit: http://www.masshist.org/endofslavery/.
This internship also reinforced for me the importance of building connections between different cultural institutions, such as museums, archives and libraries, and knowing other institutions' collection strengths. Researchers asked me several questions this semester that our library didn't have the right resources to answer, so I sent people to other repositories. For example, since genealogy is not a collecting focus of the MHS I referred several people to the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the Massachusetts State Archives. However, I did have one genealogical victory. A researcher wanted information on an ancestor that lived in Charlestown during the 17th century, and I was surprised to discover several mentions of him in our ready reference collection, as well as an autobiography on Google Books!
Overall, this internship gave me a greater appreciation of reference librarians. There is so much information, not only in the physical collections but also on the web, that knowing which sources to check takes trial and error, experience, and a great memory. I was lucky to pick up a few tips in my time here.
Hive Home
Recent Posts
- Barbara Hillard Smith’s Diary, April 1918
- This Week @ MHS
- Charles Cornish Pearson and the Great War, Part V
- This Week @ MHS
- “Vast awful & never ending Eternity”: Personal Accounts of Mourning
- The Baker and the Bear
- This Week @ MHS
- “Feasting and fasting”: Easter in St. Petersburg
- This Week @ MHS
- Charles Cornish Pearson and the Great War, Part IV
- “Across wide fields of melting snow / The winds of summer softly blow”: The Easter poems of Lucy Larcom
- This Week @ MHS
- World Poetry Day, Porcine Edition
- This Week @ MHS
- Welcome to Our 2018-2019 MHS-NEH Fellows!
Beehive Series
- Around MHS
- Around the Neighborhood
- Blog Info
- Civil War
- Collection Profiles
- Collections News
- Education Programs
- Exhibitions News
- From Our Collections
- From the Reading Room
- From the Reference Librarian
- MHS in the News
- On Loan
- Readers Relate
- Reading the Proceedings
- Recent Events
- Research Published
- Today @MHS
Archives
- April 2018 (9)
- March 2018 (12)
- February 2018 (10)
- January 2018 (12)
- December 2017 (8)
- November 2017 (10)
- October 2017 (11)
- September 2017 (9)
- August 2017 (11)
- July 2017 (12)
- complete archives
For questions, comments, and suggestions,
email the beekeeper
subscribe
Comments
Commenting has closed for this post. Thank you for participating.