The Hoover Institution Library & Archives relaunched its Summer Archives Graduate Student Internship Program this past summer after several years on hiatus. Under the mentorship of Tanya Yule, descriptive services manager for archival control and herself a former intern, three early-career archivists learned the ropes of archival practice. In addition to the description team, the interns also spent time working with the research, education and outreach team. In this Q&A, the 2022 cohort—Joemar Clemente, Kaitlin Forgash, and Devin McGeehan Muchmore—reflect on their experiences and offer advice for graduate students considering an internship with the Library & Archives.
Tell us about yourselves. What brought you to the Hoover Institution Library & Archives Summer Archives Graduate Student Internship Program?
Kaitlin Forgash (KF): I learned about this internship through the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program at San José State University, where I’m a second-year graduate student on the archival studies career pathway. I already have an MA in Japanese history from UC Berkeley and joined the program to learn how to work with primary and rare materials in archival institutions. I was told by archivists that the best way to build my archiving skills and knowledge is to participate in internships, and they were absolutely right. This is my first time working in an archive.
Joemar Clemente (JC): I learned about the internship through Archives Gig, and I applied for the internship several times before. It’s been on my radar for a while. I always felt it was a competitive internship, as many entry-level career-path opportunities in the archives seem to start with volunteer opportunities or unpaid internships. The prospect of gaining hands-on experience in archival work brought me to the Library & Archives. Before I began this internship program, my primary experience in the information profession, after completing a MLIS from San José State University, was in the geographic information systems (GIS) world. I also have training in European, US, and Asian American history, so shifting from an uber-digital information environment like GIS to a more historically analog one wasn’t too bad a change—especially since the Library & Archives, like all other archives, is engaging in the digital space and utilizing digital tools to complete its processing of archival materials. Overall, I enjoyed my time here at the Library & Archives.
Devin McGeehan Muchmore (DMM): Hello! My name is Devin McGeehan Muchmore and I’m currently an online MS student in library and information science at Simmons University, where I’m concentrating in archives management. Similarly to Kaitlin and Joemar, I applied to the Library & Archives with the goal of deepening my experience with archives. I’d gotten a taste in the spring semester of 2022, when as part of my Introduction to Archival Theory and Practice course at Simmons, I completed a 60-hour field experience at Brooklyn College’s Archives and Special Collections. That brief experience with processing was thrilling, so I searched Archives Gig for full-time, paid opportunities for early-career archivists-in-training like me. The Library & Archives posting immediately jumped out with how much it centered the career development of interns. I also knew the Library & Archives by reputation, as many of my friends and colleagues from my earlier work as an academic historian gushed about its holdings related to Cold War, Imperial Russian, and Soviet histories. So I applied.
What projects did you work on?
KF: I worked on a wide range of projects, and I’ll give two examples here. The first is rehousing materials from some manuscript boxes that got wet in the stacks. Together with Joemar and Devin, I inspected these materials to make sure they hadn’t grown mold and then labeled new folders and placed them in new boxes. I also processed the collection of Spencer M. Williams. Williams unsuccessfully ran for California attorney general in 1966 but was then appointed as an official in the California Reagan [gubernatorial] administration. This included figuring out date ranges, assigning series, and creating a sheet to import the collection data into the ArchivesSpace software, which produces a finding aid that is published on the Online Archive of California.
JC: My Library & Archives internship was a well-rounded one. I was able to dabble in research services, serving manuscript boxes to researchers at the circulation desk. I worked at the reference desk in the reading room and answered remote reference questions from researchers who asked really fascinating questions about Library & Archives’ collections. One question prompted me to hunt down a rare six-volume manuscript that the researcher hoped was in our collections—all to no avail. I kindly referred the researcher to a collection at another archive for a better prospect of finding the rare manuscript, but the task of helping someone with their research was a very rewarding process. I also had the opportunity to develop a LibGuide, which we commonly refer to as research guide, titled “United Nations History.”
DMM: We worked on so many projects, both individually and as a team. The first couple of weeks were devoted to training. Our supervisor, Tanya Yule, developed several modules to refresh our memories of archival standards—namely DACS [Describing Archives: A Content Standard] and EAD [Encoded Archival Description]—while also offering crash courses in preservation, photograph and moving image identification, and ArchivesSpace (an archives management application). We wrapped up our training by putting these lessons to work. With Tanya’s guidance, we collectively arranged and described the Hubert Work miscellaneous papers. In addition to being a chance to get our hands dirty (well, dusty), it was a great team-building exercise, laying the groundwork for the group rehousing project that Kaitlin has described.
I think Joemar and Kaitlin’s responses do a good job of explaining the range of work we did after completing training. We worked circulation and reference desk shifts in the busy reading room, answered remote reference queries, developed research guides to connect users to collections, and took individual ownership over processing a collection—taking it from collection survey to end processing.
What was your favorite part of the internship?
KF: I really appreciated meeting and working with the Library & Archives staff, who have all kinds of expertise and responsibilities. Having never worked in an archive before, I wanted to experience as much as possible, and I did. I worked in the reading room and in the library stacks and processed collections, which also included deaccessioning items and following preservation practices. I worked with reference services, updated a research guide, and processed about 20 manuscript boxes. I am grateful to the staff for their guidance and feel prepared to begin archival work.
JC: My favorite part of the internship was the capstone project of processing your own archival collection and producing a finding aid to that specific collection. I arranged and described the papers of Belgian-American scientist Urbain Joseph Kinet, who documented World War II activity in the Belgian Congo in support of the Allied cause. In archival processing, there is indubitably a lot of repetitive—albeit necessary—work that archivists have to complete. Things like removing rusty staples, gently brushing away dust (or the occasional flattened spider or ant), and rehousing things, but once in a while you come across an interesting document or something that catches your eye. Unique objects like those encourage (sometimes require) you to conduct light research to better understand the item within the context of the collection or historical period. I find those moments of curiosity worthwhile. I’m surprised how much archivists have to research their collections—and it seems the more you know about your collection’s context, the more efficient you are at processing and describing the collection itself. For the Kinet papers that I processed this summer, the best example of this is the medals he received for his civilian World War II service. I conducted some background research about the medals to understand their historical context within the collection, which allowed me to prepare a more complete description in the finding aid.
DMM: It is hard to choose just one thing because, as Kaitlin points out, we did so many things! I can say that I found it rewarding to process a multilingual and multimedia collection. I had the chance to arrange and describe the Irma Erman papers. Erman (1908–2000) was a German-Jewish poet, playwright, visual artist, and refugee to Shanghai and Northern California. On a personal level, I found it meaningful to play a role in preserving and providing access to the records of her creative and often difficult life. Working as an archivist-in-training through a collection that contains so many media taught me a lot about what it means to approach original materials archivally, rather than as a librarian, a museum registrar, or a historian. For example, the Irma Erman papers include what ended up being 19 boxes of drawings, watercolor and acrylic paintings, and what Erman termed “collages,” or geode fragments attached to boards. As an archivist at the Library & Archives, my priority was not to offer item-level descriptions of these as individual aesthetic works but rather to emphasize the context of their creation as well as their interrelationships with the larger aggregation of records.
In another vein, I found balancing the Erman processing with research services work to be a gratifying arrangement. Answering remote reference questions was particularly fun! The last reference query that was assigned to me, to offer just one example, involved tracking down records related to the carillon in Hoover Tower, as well as tapestries that were gifted to Stanford in the 1950s. Responding to these reference queries was a great opportunity to further develop core reference competencies while learning more about Hoover history.
Finally, I want to reiterate what Kaitlin said about getting to work with and learn from so many smart and generous people. It is easy to imagine archival work as very individual and even isolating. There was never a day when I wasn’t chatting with one of my fellow interns or interacting with colleagues across the organization.
What would be your best advice to the next cohort of interns? Or, why would you recommend interning at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives?
KF: I would recommend interning at the Library & Archives because it is a fantastic place to build the skills you will need in the archiving profession. If you look at job postings on Archives Gig, LinkedIn, HigherEdJobs, etc., they all require or prefer hands-on archival experience. At the Library & Archives you will learn to process collections and perform archival tasks from experts in the field at one of the top archival repositories in the country, with one million volumes and over 6,000 archival collections that attract researchers from around the world. In addition, there are few paid archiving internships, and Hoover offers a well-paid full-time internship. This is a very good opportunity for any prospective archivist.
JC: I recommend entering the internship with an open mind. Be open to learning about or completing tasks assigned that you’ve neither done before nor even knew was an important aspect of archival work. You might enjoy the assignment’s results. The Library & Archives’ internship program provides a safe environment to fail—even after rigorous training in preparation. You’ll learn in the process that archivists are a diverse bunch of folks who do many things, all in the service of preserving the historical record and providing access to that shared legacy. If those things sound very appealing to you or even moderately so, perhaps you’ll find an internship at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives a rewarding experience.
DMM: My biggest piece of advice would be to ask questions! Interning at Hoover represents a rare opportunity to see how archives and library workers in a large repository operationalize all the theories you learn about in grad school. Even more than building essential skills, by asking a lot of questions I developed a stronger understanding of how all the different units of an archives work together to acquire, preserve, and provide access to records.
