Miriam Kashem

Hello, my name is Miriam, an Archives Management/History dual-degree student. This summer, like many Archives students, I have been completing the LIS 502 130-hour internship. I chose to do my internship at home since I would be here for the summer, and because the “two birds with one stone”? option seemed best. I completed my internship at the University Archives of Florida International University, which coincidently is my undergrad alum (go Panthers!).

The archives are located in the Green Library.

The internship was a great experience as a whole, but I will admit there were times where I thought ?I hope I?m doing this right.? The best aspect of an internship is that we can get experience while still being able to ask questions and make mistakes (??and get messy!?, as Ms. Frizzle says on The Magic School Bus).

My first week at the archives was a bit hectic and overwhelming- I was given a tour of the stacks and additional storage areas when I came in and asked to choose which collection I wanted to work with about twenty minutes later. I chose to work on a collection documenting the work of Mary Brickell and her descendants. Mary Brickell was one of the founders of the City of Miami along with her husband, though she was forgotten for a while before a local historian researched the family and presented Brickell?s story to the public.

I quickly learned how diverse working in an archives could be. The researchers that came in varied from medical school students and biology students, to film production crew members. Rather than be nervous, I was actually excited to see people from so many different backgrounds utilizing archives. In later days, I got to experience the dirty work of archives. Many of the documents were brittle to the touch, old, dusty, and dirty (having dirt on them–not a reflection of the subject matter). I also had a side project to work with books from the Everglades Park Library, which had their fair share of silverfish, spiders, ants, and other critters. It was good (if also ?icky?) to get experience in working with such materials, using what I learned in my LIS 439 class in a real-life situation.

Making a Melinex enclosure for a fragile map.

I finished the Brickell collection earlier than expected, so I agreed to work with another collection belonging to a sociology professor who studied the refugee crises in the 1980s in Miami and helped advocate for the refugees of Cuba and Haiti. My internship therefore taught me about the founding of the city and the modern-day demographics of Miami. In working with the second collection, I also got to experience teaching two staff members some basic tasks involved in processing a collection. [Lesson: Teaching is hard.]

Materials neatly put away in boxes. It?s a happy world.

In addition to working with the collections, I also enjoyed the smaller moments and experiences: talking to researchers, listening to staff meetings, setting up for events, staff parties, etc. Though it sounds cheesy, I learned that archives are about the people involved as well as the materials they hold within their stacks. On that note, I wish everyone a happy rest of summer and good luck in preparing for the fall semester!