What does an ALPLM intern do?

By Brennen Smith

I’m Brennen Smith, a student at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Ill. My major is history, and I worked as an intern at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum this summer. Throughout my time there, I was fortunate enough to work alongside great librarians and staff members from both the library and the museum. I worked in the Audiovisual Department and got to learn both from AV Librarians Kelsey Wise and Matthew Deihl and from other staff. They showed me the ins and outs of working in a library setting and the standard that should be set in order to be as successful as possible.

For my main project at the ALPLM, I published an unprocessed collection of photographs into one of the databases that the library uses for digitized items. This database is known as CONTENTdm, where many of the library’s digitized items and collections are published for the public to see and access. The collection I worked on is titled “Spanish-American War Veterans Collection”. It’s a selection of 32 photos of Illinois soldiers during the war and veterans’ events afterward. Records indicate they were given to the state when the veterans group United Spanish War Veterans closed its Illinois division. Many of the photos were taken by a Calvin P. Austin of Effingham, Ill.

Photos of Charles Thomas and of John Cronk and William Sprinkle

The first step of publishing this collection was to digitize the photographs. After I scanned the front and back of each one, I then created a finding aid. A finding aid helps people who are looking for a certain subject or word. After creating the finding aid and giving the collection a short description, I published the finding aid to ArchivesSpace, a tool for the public to explore what’s available in our AV and Manuscripts collections Then I began working on a spreadsheet that had all the needed information to upload the images into CONTENTdm along with the metadata (information on details such as people, place, date and photographer) for each picture.

Brennen Smith at work (Photo by Austin Weidhuner, Illinois College)

After inserting all the needed metadata into the spreadsheet, I then transferred the information from the spreadsheet along with the scans of the images into CONTENTdm and officially published the collection for any person to access online. This project opened my eyes to many different career paths post-graduation, as well as new skills that I would be able to use in the workplace wherever I end up working.

Arthur Currie of Effingham, Ill., standing outside a guard house at Camp Cuba Libre, Fla.

A crowd watches as veterans of the Spanish-American War march in a 1946 Memorial Day parade.

I was just one of many interns at the ALPLM. Eight others worked there when I did, and all of them had their own duties and special projects. Some assisted historians. Others learned about designing exhibitions or teaching children or sharing information on social media. I’m certain that each one learned new skills and, more importantly, got new perspectives that will help them make good choices as they figure out what path to follow after college.