This week was my last week at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I worked four days this week for 19 hours, making my total hours in my internship, 149 hours, as I wanted to finish with a full week of work to give myself extra time in case there were any last minute things I needed to polish up. I had a really great time this week, and in my internship as a whole. It has an incredibly rewarding and unique experience, that I looked back fondly at this week as my work was winding down. I finished up a lot of interesting things this week that made my last couple days incredibly satisfying.
Monday I did some tweaking edits in the Admission Book I had completely at the end of last week, as well as starting revisions to my research component. Tuesday the main highlight of my day was I got to attend another Colloquium at the Library Company along with doing my other duties. That was a fun time, though I didn’t have time to get anymore cool buttons! I also while I had access to the letters and other documents, brainstormed things to do for my final presentation for the Practicum, but I won’t spoil any of that here.
Wednesday I spent a large part of my time getting feedback and improving my written research material. Building from my supervisor’s first suggestion of using more of the official institutional documents to back up my arguments with the letters was incredibly helpful. With his help, I further developed my arguments and outlined clearly the Orphan Society of Philadelphia’s policies on custody. This made the piece stronger and easier for a reader to understand the issues surrounding custody and family requests in these letters. My issue was I had become so entrenched in the information about the Society, I knew all these details off the top of my head, but for a researcher who is just finding out about this organization, information would have slipped under the cracks if I didn’t point out things very specifically. Having another set of eyes on the piece really helped me realize this issue and fix it, which is always good news.
Today once I had confirmed with my boss that my writing was good to go, I learned more about the presentation I will have to do for the HSP staff, on the Orphan Society records. Basically, my boss picked a date in August and I will just commute over there to do the presentation with my fellow interns, it’s not necessary to count for my hours or anything like that, just a fun opportunity. I also was curious about when the OSP records would be made available to the public, and my boss explained to me the numerous steps involved in order to make that happen. What with editing and coding the material, it will be a long process but I am still excited and will be looking forward to when the records go live. Today I also worked on transcribing more letters that I had skipped over in my original week or so working on them. They were easier to read now, and honestly I thought I had skipped a lot more but I had just forgotten to attach a letter to ALL the children involved in the document, such as younger siblings, when necessary. So, I’d go find a blank spot on my Excel and realize all I had to do was copy and paste it! Overall I had a really great week and an amazing time at my internship.
A VERY heavily cropped photo of HSP in order to get it to the proper file size for blog