Internships Blog

A box of letters from the 1918 were donated to the museum. My job was to go read them and pull out certain ones that were interesting. The letters originally belonged to the Whitescarver family; a family native to Salem. Their son Rob was stationed in France during WWI. During his time away from home he wrote letters to his mother, father, and three sisters. He died shortly before the war ended, but his friends in his unit continued to write his family and inform them, as much as they could, about Rob’s accident. Some of the boys even formed close friendships with Rob’s mother. So I read all of the letters and put them into multiple different groups (as you can see in the picture below). I pulled aside letters Rob wrote to his parents, letters Rob’s friends wrote to his mother, letters the army sent to the Whitescarver family, and letters of condolence sent to the family after Rob’s death.

The letter will be transcribed by another person, who can read cursive better than I can, and will be used in a future exhibit in the museum. I really did enjoy going through the letters and getting a superficial connection to this family. I felt a lot of different emotions while reading the letters that I didn’t expect. Especially after reading the army letters describing how Rob died and after I did further research on Rob and the rest of the Whitescarver family; he was so close to coming home and was the first of fifteen Salem boys to die during the war.

My internship so far has presented me with multiple challenges and opportunities: working in the Roanoke City Law Library, assisting with major events, transcribing hundreds of Early Education surveys, as well as interacting with the public. However, none of these were as daunting as my first day working the Youth Services desk on my own. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I expected to be at the desk assisting as I’ve done a couple of times a week. When I arrived, I learned that the entire staff was either at a conference or at a branch assisting the branch managers. The Main library Youth Services department was left in the hands of work study students and interns, myself included. I had been in the Law Library all week so I was unaware of the conference. As I arrived, another intern was leaving and informed that the work study student of the day was at lunch and would return an hour later. For an hour, it was just me, the desk, and a fair amount of apprehension.

As I hadn’t manned the desk on my own before, I hadn’t had the opportunity to familiarize myself much with the system. Of course within ten minutes of my arrival, a call came in from a branch with a hold request for a book. So I had to not only answer the phone to represent the department, I had to use the system to find a book and see if we had it available. It doesn’t sound terribly difficult in theory, but in practice there was a tremendous amount of pressure for me to do it quickly and correctly. I ended up having to check fines, attempt to figure out the limit of fines before a user was restricted from checking out new books, logging users onto computers, and attempting to keep an eye on seven to ten small children who were running around without much supervision. Thankfully it all went smoothly for the most part, but it was quite eye opening and I learned that being a librarian is much harder than it appears.

 

It’s been a while since I have made a post. I’ve been busy helping my supervisor with various tasks involved in moving the Collections storage for the Historical Society Museum of Western VA. The two pictures involved in this post are of some film for photos that I found while sorting photos. The task I had been given was to help empty several file cabinets full of photos that had all been sorted categorically. It is more helpful for the photos to be sorted by their accession numbers, so the move has opened the opportunity to properly sort many of our items.

 The picture to the left shows 3 archival boxes full of photos and multiple stacks of photos with no accession number, meaning that we will have to go through at a later date and find each photo’s individual number.  The photos at the top are of photographic film in mylar plastic envelopes that have been labeled with archival ink on top of acryloid. Each photograph or piece of film needs to be put in its own mylar, placed in a labeled archival folder, and put into the box that corresponds with the year of the accession record.

For the past several months I have heard nonstop about how amazing the memorial looks in the spring when the cherry trees bloom and the water comes back in late March. I did not completely believe the tales spread by volunteers and faculty alike, but the rumors are more than true. Driving up to see the majestic glade of pink reminded me of why I was interning there. The past few weeks have been rather slow for me as I have been busy and Maggie has been away, so my office times have not been consistent. I have put together many upon many teacher bags that contain children activity books as well as activities that Maggie has made, as well as a nicely placed coffee mug. I finished my first attempt at Living History Scripts and she liked them so much she decided that we don’t need another draft of them after all. I completed a blog post for the memorial to be used on their website. In the coming weeks I will be engaging more directly with tour groups and school field trips! Through the weeks I think that I have come to the conclusion that perhaps I am not cut out for memorial/museum work. I love working with the activities and seeing the faces of engaged kids but something has been missing for me. Perhaps its because I haven’t had that glade of pink and running water to remind me of why I myself was there. I have long pondered why other people are there, but not myself. Why is that? Finally I find myself placed upon the mountain of remembrance and reverence for the men and women that made not just D Day successful, but all of World War II. It has been a way for me to claim my own space within history and education and allowed me to converse more readily about how we teach history. I look forward to finishing my internship project in the next two weeks.

Matt Myers

 

 

The past weeks within my internship with the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation, I have continued to work at the tasks presented before me. I have what I believe to have finished the list of public history groups within the Roanoke Valley, but with this I have also marked which groups possibly have a historical location or building that the Foundation could sell a marker to. These plaques indicate how long the building has been there as well as a endorsement from the Foundation.

Another task that I have begun is creating a powerpoint on all existing Rosenwald schools around Southwest Virginia. The Rosenwald schools as I have mentioned earlier, were established all around the United States for African American students during the early 20th century. Many of these schools are still standing, for the purpose of the Foundation I plan to compile any know pictures of the schools within Southwest Virginia. After researching the area schools I plan to also write an article for the Foundations newsletter on the life of Julius Rosenwald and the schools he created.

The skills that I have learned thus far in my internship have been closely related with organization as well as time management as I have continued work on the individual projects at an even pace. I believe that my research skills have also been strengthened from my work with the Rosenwald Schools.

I have begun to work even more depth with creating the EDUC Resources page and I love it! Creating activities and thinking about what we should/could include within a webpage for educators is so much fun. I have become more intimate with some information I never learned in school; such as the shift from making toys from metal in WWII to wood and types of plastic. I have also been working on several scripts for our Prelude event which houses several living historians. Creating these scripts forces me to get outside of the normal parameters of the tour script and make it more intimate and first person story telling. I have never done anything like this before, making it a learning curve, but I am optimistic. I also helped lead a school night for 21st century grant school Moneta Elementary where I gave these students the induction exam that a soldier would have had to take back in 1943. I am having a blast all while working on my communication skills while also forcing me to be creative and inventive with my activity designs.

I finished making the signs for the Courthouse Portraits this week. This included cutting them down, gluing them on foam board, cutting the foam board, and finally putting up the finished signs. My least favorite step was cutting the foam board, I was given the a lot of freedom when it came to the design and layout of the signs; this freedom included deciding if I wanted to use foam board backing. In the end I did use the foam board because the signs looked better on it than they did just stuck to the wall alone. This was an annoying process because I was terrible at cutting the foam board out and had to reprint, re-cut and re-glue six of the signs on to the foam board and then re-cut the foam board. But after my second attempt I was finally ready to hang all of the signs up.                   Hanging the sings was the best and most rewarding part of this entire process, I used sticky tack to attach the signs to the wall and got to chose where the signs were put. The best part was fitting the signs between the two portraits pictured. Because of the closeness of the two portraits I was not left with much room to place the signs at a level that would be pleasing to viewers.  Putting the signs in between the portraits worked out better than I previously thought when I was planning out the sign layout before I printed the signs.

 

For the past few weeks I have been working on making new signs for the Courthouse pictures hanging in the third floor stair way. This has been a learning experience, the process has thus far included doing a lot of research on the 1910 Roanoke County Courthouse (which is now our campus’ West build) and the people in the portraits that were commissioned for it’s opening. After my research was complete and fact checked by one of the directors, Fran, I began typing up short bios on the men and a brief introduction of the 1910 Courthouse. This is where most of my struggles began, for when making sign for a museum is not like writing a research paper. You have to pick information that describes the subject enough for viewers to be able to understand its relevance, while at the same time not putting too much information which may bore them. After more checks from Fran I was finally able to design what the signs would look like, this was a process in it self but was fun to put my own spin on the layout of the signs.

Pictured below is a rough draft of one of my designs, it is not very flashy but I didn’t want to put too much and distract viewers from the actual exhibit. In the future the signs will have a cream colored background. And once they get the final okay from Fran I will begin the final process of hanging up the signs!     

Welp! Several more weeks down and I have begun working on skills associated with creating activities for students at the memorial. We have a lot of educational programs here at D Day and I was brought on to work on these events/field trips so it is REALLY neat to be working on this material. Triangulating SOL assessment, school criteria, and content has been really entertaining and insightful. Some activities are really fun to do, like create cardboard tanks and reenact a battle, but are impractical from a curriculum standpoint. Knowing when to bring out the purely ‘fun’ activities is becoming increasingly easier. I have also been working on giving the tour of the monument; which has been loads of fun. Getting to engage with the monument every single day is a dream and I learn something new each day and with each tour. Knowing what to include within your tour and what to leave out is essential to a good tour. I have been on some tours that are two and a half hours…for your information the tours are only supposed to be between fifty minutes and an hour long. I could have received college credit for some of those tours! Recently we have been working hard on the World War II in Film conference occurring this summer at Liberty University and figuring out what we want included for the scholarship program. I had the idea to have the teachers submit a children’s guide of the museum that was engaging and encompassed the ‘grown-up’ tour. I don’t necessarily agree with my supervisor on every educational decision but I have learned a lot from her. She is extremely creative and easily communicable which helps move the day along and keep the activities interesting. Kids need to be engaged in order to learn so creating activities that engage them, teach them, and meet the standards of the state is more than difficult yet somehow she does it! Of course she has help from other educators and museum educators alike but it is neat to see the close-knit community between museums and educational systems. My internship project is creating an Education Resources Database that includes lesson plans by criteria of the SOL standards. Teachers and museums will be able to simply click on a desired SOL standard and see all these activities that align with it. Ahh well back to the grind!! Until next time.

These past few weeks I have been given the task of editing the contacts list of the Foundation. Throughout the list I have editing the web address of individual groups that may have changed throughout the past years. Another aspect that I have changed is the mailing address for each organization. This will hopefully make it much easier for the mailing of the newsletter as well as create an opportunity to mail invitations. Lastly I would also like to add on any history related organizations that are new in the Roanoke Valley. All in all this contacts list is being compiled into an Excel Spreadsheet, with this I will lay out all contacts to where they are far more accessible for anyone to use.

This activity has been one that I have been able to mostly do from my laptop, however I will say there has been many different documents that I have had to refer to. From past contact list to previous award recipients, there is many separate groups within the Valley that I have had to consider. The skills that I have learned from this activity would have to be along the lines of organization and research. Not only am I trying to compile a large amount of contacts into one document, but I am also having to research if there are any changes in the organization’s email, website, mailing address, and phone number.