Week 4: Field Trip to the College Archives

 Welcome back! 

This week we took a trip to the special collections and archive at UCF’s library and met with the staff there to talk about what all their work entails and some of the education backgrounds of those who work there. David Benjamin who is the head of the archives at UCF explained how they process their documents and why they do it that way. We also got to have a Q &A portion with the team to ask anything we were interested about. I decided to ask about the job hiring process, specifically how much of getting the job is having experience versus having the educational background. It seemed to me based on his answer that in most all cases most archives would rather have someone with intimate knowledge on what they were doing and how they could apply their skills to any scenario, instead of someone who may have a masters degree but has no internship or job experience at all.

Getting a job is hard, but it's especially hard when the history job market is not high in need, like nurses for example. Masters degrees are not an availability for everyone but something I would consider later on in my  life. However I have much experience in the corporate world  and have been lucky enough to do work that is similar to the archiving and processing work that I do for team VHP. I hope that my knowledge and determination will be enough to help me find a job in my preferred field but we will see what the future holds. As for work with team VHP I was finally able to complete all my work in making the folders and we can officially begin processing. As with all technology; links can be finnicky so there was some trial and error to work through in order for everyone to get going. Week 5 is going to be a busy one but I am so excited to finally start processing story day materials from last semester and to do the first one-on-one's with the team.

Until Next Time! Here are some photos from the Field Trip


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