Internship Reflections

Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Stella Henry, and I am currently in my final semester enrolled in the Master of Library Science Program at Southern Connecticut State University. As it happens, I have chosen to spend my last semester before graduating as an intern here at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven. When I first found out about this opportunity last fall, I assumed JHS would be located several miles from SCSU, but to my surprise, it is literally right on campus! But given its nondescript location (trailers don’t exactly stand out), I can’t say it surprises me that I was unaware of its existence until so recently. One thing is for certain though: the JHS is a hidden gem that is just waiting to be discovered.

Of course, it is easy for me to overlook the fact that the JHS is not a stand-alone organization: it is part of a broader organization, the Ethnic Heritage Center, which is also composed of the Italian-American, Ukrainian-American, Irish-American and African-American Historical Societies. But because my internship is only focused on the Jewish Historical Society, I have only been dealing with records and materials pertaining to Jewish history. When I first met with Nicole, the managing archivist at the JHS, in the fall of last year to discuss the possibility of interning here, she made it clear that although she would be my supervisor and had ideas for projects that I could work on, that I would be free to pursue those that most interested me and that would help me develop skills that I needed in my future career. As such, I am grateful to Nicole for granting me the freedom to pursue the things I want to pursue and make the most out of my time here.

I am technically not new to the world of Special Collections and Archives. During my first two semesters at Southern, I had the chance to work as a graduate assistant in the Buley Library Special Collections and Archives at SCSU. The eight months that I spent there working under the Archivist proved to be a formative experience for me, as it was during this time that I began to consider archival work to be a potential career path. Like most people, I had previously assumed that archives and libraries were pretty much the same thing, but I now know that there are several critical differences. While I am glad to have had the experience that I did at the Buley SCA, I didn’t get to do much in the way of “hands-on” work there. But here at the JHS, I have been able to work on projects that I could only have dreamed of doing previously, like creating a finding aid for a collection and making it searchable on ArchivesSpace, a software system that everyone in the archival field must become intimately familiar with.

A couple of months ago, Nicole also brought up the idea of me helping to plan an instructional session for students in an undergraduate history class. This instructional session was meant to be a kind of introduction to archival concepts and practices, and I agreed to help develop the lesson plan and create the PowerPoint Presentation slides. Nicole also said that I could help teach the lesson, but I decided that it would be better for Nicole to take the lead and for me to just observe.

Another project that I have gotten to work on is transcribing oral history recordings. There are apparently hundreds of oral histories in JHS collections, but transcripts have yet to be created for most of them, so they are still in a “black box” of sorts. I should add that artificial intelligence tools are already capable of transcribing audio recordings, but these tools are still far from perfect. Tools like Otter.ai are likely to produce errors when speech is rapid or words are mumbled, and cannot remove filler words like, well, “like,” “um,” and “uh huh.” I have also been hoping to provide reference assistance to researchers who come to the JHS, but unfortunately, the JHS does not receive many outside visitors, so I haven’t really had the chance to do this.

 It feels like it was literally just yesterday that I started my internship at the JHS, but my last day here is now two weeks away. A couple weeks after that, I will officially graduate from the MLIS Program and will technically be a full-fledged librarian! Even thinking about entering the “real world” after ~20 years of being in school is daunting, but I feel well-prepared (or at least as well-prepared as anyone could be). I didn’t really know what to expect going into this internship, but I never could have imagined just how closely it aligns with my interests. Above all, no matter what path my life takes in the future, I will always be grateful to have had this experience at the Jewish Historical Society.