Bicentennial Exhibit Development Internship Week 2

 Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project:

This week has been focusing on getting everyone comfortable and familiar with the project and what is to come over the semester. On Wednesday, we met with everyone in Public History Central to discuss our trainings that we were assigned after the first meeting last week. These trainings involved metadata work, transcription, History Harvests, oral histories, and other related topics. Although not all of these trainings applied to what our team on the Bicentennial project will engage with, it was a great opportunity for us to learn new skills that we can apply generally as training historians! I really enjoyed the transcription trainings, since I have worked on a project that involved transcriptions before this internship through the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center. Getting to reflect on that project in my training for Public History Central was nice to see how my skills have developed over time. 

This week, we also had some exercises to train using Teams, which is how we will be communicating as a group throughout the semester. Also during the meeting, we were tasked with learning how to enter metadata information, which is important for historical work. We trained to do this by picking an object from our respective locations and using it to enter in metadata. I had not really worked with any sort of metadata before, besides one project I briefly worked on a few semesters ago, so it was nice to have a true training session on how to do this kind of work. The rest of the meeting was to inform us of some changes that involve team members on other projects, and what to expect next week, which involves a field trip to the Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) space on campus. I have found myself in the CHDR space quite often, but I am excited to see what we will learn about while we are there next week. 

After the meeting with Public History Central, the project supervisor and I met with the other undergraduate interns that I will be helping to supervise throughout the semester. This meeting was mainly to get everyone familiar with each other and to establish what everyone's roles will be in the project. Since I am an undergraduate team lead, my role differs slightly from what I expected to do in this project. I am still able to do the work that will be displayed in the exhibit, such as narrative and interpretive text, measuring the space, etc., but I also have to make sure I am providing space for the other interns to learn as well. This is not an issue for me, and I am excited to learn two parts of this experience: learning how to be a "people manager", and how to create an exhibit. 

The main takeaways from meeting also involved some readings and homework we will have to do as interns to learn the ins-and-outs of creating an exhibit. These readings are mostly chapters and articles from sources that are about Public History and Museum Studies, which will be a wonderful way to learn about this type of work. We also went over the deadlines that we will have to adhere to throughout the semester. 

As for our current tasks, we have to wait until there is more information about what the stakeholders' visions are for the exhibit before we can begin to work on the major parts. After this information is given to us, then we will begin to go through the collections and pick the items and themes for the overall ideas. I am excited for this part, because it will provide us with true hands-on experience with creating an exhibit. 

For now, we will keep reading and learning about what it means to create an exhibit like this, and wait for more information to come our way! 

See you next week!