The Beauty of Interns

I believe having interns is one of the best ways one can contribute to the field. I know I learned a lot through internships, all of which helped prepare me for my role at the LHS today.

Since I began working here last June, we've had a number of really great interns. These interns have helped us in a number of ways--creating public programs, organizing collections, and creating interpretive materials. This summer was no exception and in the past 2 weeks or so, we've had a couple of intern projects wrap up quite nicely.

This spring and summer we had a really great intern named Eli Pousson. Eli is a recent MA graduate from the University of Maryland, College Park. He worked with us to put together a shortened version of our walking tour and an accompanying online version. He knows a lot more about computers and fancy programs like In-Design than I do, so it was really great getting to work with him.

With the help of our 2006 Walking Tour, Eli created a shortened tour based on 5 themes. This tour is available both at the Museum and online.

Next, he placed an extensive number of the sites on the 2006 Walking Tour on a map online along with images.

Although we still have a few kinks to work out for the Online Walking Tour, we are now proud to present both of these new products to the public. You can access them online by clicking here. As I mentioned, the Online Walking tour has a few kinks--we're trying to see if we can embed it in the website. But if the link doesn't work for you the first time, try, try again!

Another of our interns this summer was Lauren Hanna. Lauren is an undergrad at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who wanted to get her feet wet in the Museum field.

She began her work by reading a little about collections work in the Museum field. She learned how to navigate our collections database, Past Perfect, by scanning some images and attaching them to their corresponding catalogue record.

Once she was comfortable with PP, we settled on a project for her that involved inventorying our Historic Kitchen, locating accessioned objects in PP and collecting descriptions of un-accessioned objects from our Education Collection. She took a picture of every single object in the kitchen and matched it with a corresponding description. She then put all of this useful information in a binder.

The binder is now located in the Kitchen as a very extensive gallery guide. It will definitely prove to be useful reading for our volunteers who are interested in learning all about the Kitchen.

So there you have it--2 very important projects completed solely through the efforts of interns.

These are just the two most recent of many interns that the LHS has had help us over the past year.

I am very grateful to all of our interns for their efforts.

Thank you Eli Pousson, Lauren Hanna, Christine Powers, Jessica Bulger, Kevin Alvarez, and Joe Heinen!