Internship - Day 1.0

My first day at my first internship flew by! It was a great day and I'm fortunate to have an excellent site supervisor. She tweeted my impending arrival here. I spent the morning getting inducted and reviewing various training and policy and procedure manuals. Here's my pleasant work space. Behind me are windows facing northeast with the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance.

UCI Special Collections and Archives intern work space.

Here are more details about my first day:

9:00 AM - Showed up at the Library HR to register as an intern. I signed an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and to relinquish all claims to new patents. No problem on number 1. Number 2 seems highly unlikely it'll be an issue.

9:15 AM - My internship supervisor, showed me my nice workspace, where to find archival supplies, and introduced me to staff members Steve and Alix. Michelle Light stuck her head in to welcome me aboard. There are other folks to still meet, like Andrew and Patricia who works in the Science Library.

My supervisor went over my reading duties for the morning including the online "Student Assistant Handbook," "Archival Processing Manual, Accessioning Manual," and online "Documents for Interns." The also a "Guidelines for Efficient Archival Processing in the UC Libraries" document that my supervisor would like me to test drive while I'm processing the collections assigned to me. She will also involve me in any learning opportunities that come along including attending meetings! I asked about the possibility of getting exposed to acquisition policies and reference room activities.

For lunch, my supervisor introduced me to the various fare at the Student Center. We both settled on Rubio's. She also explained "bobas" to me. Apparently I missed a day of pop culture training as my wife knew all about this drink of milky tea and gummy bears.

After lunch I poked around the UCI installation of Archivists' Toolkit which is currently at Version 2, build 13. At 2:00 PM, my supervisor and I joined four other UCI Library colleagues for a California Digital Library (CDL) webinar. The subject was updates to CDL's digital objects repository, Merritt. It's interesting to see that in addition to the Online Archive of California (OAC), CDL also offers a place for member organizations to store digital objects in a dark archives.

Opening up the box of unprocessed ECOC records for the first time.

From about 3:00 PM to my departure at 5:30 PM, I began reviewing the first of the three collections set aside for me to process as the primary goal of my internship. The first thing a processor is supposed to develop is a preliminary work plan. This preliminary work plan is then reviewed and approved by the archivist before any real work begins.

The preliminary work plan is not typically the time when a processor does the background research on the source of the collection (that's more during development of the Processing Work Plan or Work Sheet), but I wanted to get a quick understanding of the nature of the Environmental Coalition of Orange County (ECOC). Neither a review of the box contents nor a Google search turned up an organization description. So I turned to the OAC and found a decent hit in UCI's own Special Collections -- copies of Environmental News, the ECOC's newsletter.

Thus ended the first day on the job at the internship.