Internship – Page 2 – Public History at UMass Boston

December 18, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 2 Comments

Internship: Designing for the Public

By Maci Mark.

Over the past few months, I have had the wonderful opportunity to work on my internship project with the National Parks of Boston while also serving as a Seasonal Park Ranger. For this project I have been working with the Digital Humanities and Innovation Team to research, write, and design new waysides for the USS Cassin Young. The goal of this project is to provide more context, interpretation, and connection for the ship for people who do not come aboard (due to restricted mobility or other factors like weather). When coming on board this project I was excited to further develop my skills of writing for the public; this is something that I know is important, as it is often a first impression and is the first chance to help people connect to a historic site. But I was surprised by another skill that I worked to cultivate over the past few months as well: designing for the public.

I had experience in writing for the public in other contexts, writing blog posts for UMass Boston’s University Archives and Special Collections, in my work in Hist 682 Digital Public History, and as an undergraduate student at Gettysburg College working on digital humanities projects there. But writing for waysides was a new to me task, both in how it provides information, the constraints of limited text, but also because of the important role played by design. If it is not eye catching, easy to read, and in an accessible location people are not going to stop and read. The design is a key aspect of a wayside.

I first got the chance to work with design this summer when working on the Tavern Wall we have at Faneuil Hall. Located in the Education Center in the basement of Faneuil Hall, the Tavern Wall is a space where we can anonymously engage with visitors to read their thoughts and reflections. We pose a thematic question, provide background information, and further reading through a QR code if interested. Our Tavern Wall acts similarly to the way that literal tavern walls would have had papers, flyers, and pamphlets posted on them. Literally planks of wood with nails in it for visitors to post their responses to our prompt, it also creates an anonymous forum for engagement.

A photograph of the Tavern Wall, A wooden bulletin board covered with posted papers in the basement of Faneuil Hall. — *The Tavern Wall in the Education Center in the basement of Faneuil Hall. There are numerous responses posted on the wall showing a wide variety of engagement.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

Tavern Wall prompts and information are generally changed monthly, and when I started my season in May I was given the opportunity to work on the June Tavern Wall and create one for Pride Month. I worked alongside my coworkers to help write the EQ (Essential Question which guided the theme of the wall) and was then given the opportunity to design the wall myself. I strove to create an eye-catching wall that was easy to read and did not overwhelm with information.

A photograph of a poster about Pride Month being laminated. — *The posters are laminated for longevity, one of the final steps in creating the Wall.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

The Pride Month Tavern Wall ended up with two informational posters about the 1977 Gay and Lesbian Town Hall Meetings that occurred there and posted QR codes so that visitors could read further on the town hall meeting if they were interested. It evolved around the EQ: What does Pride Mean to You? Overall, this Wall was a success with 80+ responses over the three weeks it was up, ranging from all age groups, and varying from a picture of a pride parade to a long paragraph about someone’s journey to coming out.

Working on this Tavern Wall both showed me how meaningful anonymous interactions like this can be, and also the importance of design. Ease of engagement also contributed to the success of this Tavern Wall, as it offered multiple forms of engagement, from reading, to answering, to scanning QR code, to even just reading others responses. I included a rainbow at the top of the posters I designed, to help make it eye-catching and topical, but I also included plenty of pictures of the town hall meetings as well. When walking by the space or checking on the wall I often found visitors reading the signs and reading others’ answers. I learned a lot about design from this project, about the importance of accessibility through easy-to-read language as well as easy-to-read text, via contrast in text and background, and images, which tend to draw people in. Images, especially of the site in the past, tend to draw people in as people love to see what places looked like in the past. The NPS has accessibility standards which guided my practice. After working on this I saw good examples of both good and bad accessible writing everywhere.

A poster about Pride Month and Town Halls. — *One of the posters that was posted for the June Pride Month Tavern Wall.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

I have had opportunities to work on and assist with two more Tavern Walls over the past few months. And I am taking what I learned about design work over the past few months with me as I enter the final stages of writing and designing the new USS Cassin Young waysides. While waysides are very different from the Tavern Wall, they are similar in providing opportunities for anonymous interaction, establishing connections, and most importantly, providing a first impression.

The lessons I learned about designing for the public can be applied in all my future public history work: the importance of font, coordinating colors, making texts accessible to read, images, and that brevity matters. But most importantly what I have learned over the course of the past few months is how important it is to make information easily accessible whether that is through diving into specific stories with Tavern Walls or through waysides, helping to provide a positive first impressions and provide a deeper understanding of the site.

July 29, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 1 Comment

Internship: No Such Thing as a Perfect Interview: Artists-in-Residence at Historic Sites, no. 2

By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

Hello again!

In my first post, I talked about the origin of the research project I’m working on, including how we identified artist-in-residence programs at historic sites across the country. Of course, knowing programs exist—or existed—isn’t enough.

As you might have guessed, connecting with the sites we identified had mixed results. In many cases, my supervisor Ken Turino had personal connections thanks to his extensive public history career. I was able to connect directly to a few contacts of my own. In Professor Jane Becker’s public history practicum in Spring 2021, I worked closely with Eric Hansen-Plass of Boston National Historical Park, who confirmed that there hadn’t been an artist-in-residence program there for years. Over the summer, a colleague at the Old North Church clued me in to Ryan Ahlwardt’s song “Granary” about Paul Revere. While not a result of an AIR program, the song and music video are still fantastic examples of public history by a contemporary artist.

While some site administrators did make introductions, I mostly reached out to site personnel cold through emails, phone calls, and contact forms. I was impressed by how many responding staff were interested in our work—the ones that weren’t were generally closed or understaffed due to the pandemic. I’m particularly sorry to have missed out on interviewing staff and artists from Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, which was closed along with the rest of the Diné (Navajo) Nation due to the pandemic; I was hoping to learn how a site that prioritized Native artists—and functioned under multiple governing bodies—ran an AIR program.

…

We began the interview process by creating two parallel sets of questions: one for artists-in-residence and another for site administrators, curators, and other historic site staff who worked with AIRs. These questions were broken down roughly in terms of the timeline of creating/participating in an AIR program, starting with questions about the genesis of the program, moving on to selecting an artist and the residency itself, and closing out with final products, evaluations, and lessons learned.

Overall, we interviewed twenty-five site administrators and twenty-two artists from twenty-two sites across the country. These sites ranged in size (both physical and budgetary), but there was a notable concentration of sites in the northeast—a huge bulk of our interview sites are in New England or New York. We’re not sure if this actually reflects reality or results from our northeastern network.

A graph showing the number of full-time staff at interviewed historic sites.

Interviewing artists and site administrators—in other words, growing my network!—was a pleasure. I love talking to people about both art and history, so learning about that in tandem both practically and creatively was a joy.

While there’s no such thing as a perfect interview, certain practices helped them go smoothly. As a stickler for structure, I generally sent the interview questions in advance and followed them closely. While a more conversational style would have been more natural, I didn’t want to miss any questions. No one I spoke to had answers to every question, whether because some weren’t relevant or because institutional knowledge had been lost over time. My notes, at least, were extremely easy to organize and analyze once we hit the data analysis phase.

I spoke to people from all sorts of sites, and I ended up interviewing just about all of the artists and administrators we spoke to connected to the National Park Service. As a government institution, there are more regulations to deal with, but some of the near-universal traits of NPS AIR programs were, frankly, mind-boggling. For example, a much higher percentage of NPS sites treat AIRs as volunteers than other historic sites do (and seem almost surprised that one might pay an AIR). There’s also a clause in very fine print on the NPS volunteer contract that gives the government rights to any artwork/etc created while volunteering.

The AIR-as-volunteer model has serious drawbacks. Unpaid artists must donate not only their work but their valuable time, and only artists with enough disposable income—which leaves out a significant portion of artists, particularly emerging artists and economically disadvantaged artists—can realistically participate. By not paying the artists, these sites reinforce the notion that art is not a proper profession: as one artist pointed out, sites pay professionals to restore woodwork, artwork, and more, and they pay them at professional rates. Not paying (and underpaying) artists devalues their valuable work. Sites lose out too. Minority artists are more likely to be economically disadvantaged. One of the benefits of AIR programs is their ability to bring new eyes to historic sites traditionally interpreted with narrow lenses. Minority voices are vital to expanding the stories told, and AIR programs are one way to reimagine sites, as Historic New England did with the portrait of Cyrus Bruce by Richard Haynes Jr. that I wrote about previously.

New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park’s AIR program provides a notable exception to this apparent “rule.” Here, the program is run by historic-site-AIR superstar Lindsay E. Compton, who created AIR programs at two other NPS sites: Congaree National Park and San Antonio Mission National Historical Site. New Bedford Whaling NHP provides an incredible example of a robust AIR program that pays its artists, taps into their community’s talent, and creates programming and art that speaks to varying and deep themes at the site and in the community. The current (when I interviewed Lindsay) artist-in-residence was doing a project on Polynesian women in whaling. Lindsay did in depth research to support the artist. For a more community-based example, April Jakubec, the AIR from January-March 2020, created four large portraits of women in the community who self-identified as having mental illness/struggles, sparking rich discussions around mental health. As an attached workshop, women were invited to paint a self-portrait and adorn the art with flowers, gems, and more to demonstrate different areas of healing (i.e. flowers over mouth: someone felt silenced).

A ground of women stand and kneel with painted self-portraits, many adorned with painted plants or flowers. — *April Jakubec’s AIR workshop in 2020. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park.*

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Check back for the final installment, where I’ll talk about data analysis, preparing a panel agenda, and presenting at conferences for NEMA, Connecticut Local History Organization, and AASLH.

December 22, 2021Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Collections and Connections: Interning at the Shirley-Eustis House

By Rachel Hoyle

I have enjoyed nearly every single aspect of my internship this semester at the Shirley-Eustis House in Roxbury. My duties have led me to a much deeper understanding of how museums operate, from the mundane – hanging Christmas lights for an evening event – to the glamorous preparation of the house for use as a backdrop in multiple documentaries. The site’s Executive Director, Suzy Buchanan, has been gracious enough to let me trail behind her on Fridays, learning exactly how she does what she does.

However, when I use the word “nearly,” there is one particular aspect of my internship that has led to frustration: the lack of original sources to catalog for my developing web exhibit. Given that my exhibit will focus on enslaved Africans at the house, most of whom do not even have their names written in the historical record, it is not surprising that no artifacts of their existence have survived the past three hundred years. Add to that injustice the constantly changing structure and use of the Shirley-Eustis House (at one point it was even used as a “home for wayward girls”), and it is a recipe for the reproduction rather than the display of original artifacts.

The exterior of the Shirley-Eustis House in 1940, nearly forty years prior to its restoration. As is clear from this image, the house was in very bad condition at one point in time. Photo courtesy the United States National Archives.

It is not as if I am the first person studying African enslavement to encounter this problem. The staff at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), when collecting the first artifacts for display in the museum, ventured around the nation to track down relevant objects. Physical artifacts of African American history had often been either lost, passed around to various families, or stored in people’s attics for generations.[1] It was not negligence keeping these items stowed away – it was an instinct of preservation. Many African Americans certainly knew the value of these artifacts. Rex Ellis, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the NMAAHC, recalled the moment he first came face to face with the Bible of infamous Black slave revolt leader Nat Turner. The woman who gifted it to the NMAAHC from its longtime place in her family’s Virginia home remarked that “It was time for it to leave here…because there’s so much blood on it.”[2] It was not until the NMAAHC’s founding that many of these artifacts were seen outside the confines of a single family or community, because there were few museums and historic sites willing or able to display them with a mindful acknowledgement of the artifacts’ troublesome and sometimes disturbing histories.

A page from revolutionary and slave revolt leader Nat Turner’s Bible, which is now permanently at the NMAAHC. Photo courtesy the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Once it was clear that there would be a NMAAHC, Founding Director Lonnie Bunch began a groundbreaking campaign to collect these artifacts. Under his “Saving African American Treasures” initiative, Bunch deployed conservationists and other museum professionals around the United States in an effort to identify and save artifacts protected and preserved by generations of Black families. This campaign unearthed tens of thousands of artifacts for the NMAAHC; most were free-will donations made by people who decided their personal collections were finally able to be seen and respected in the manner they necessitated.[3] This distinction between a lack of material culture and a preservation of the very same culture is essential. How many other artifacts are still hidden in an attic, trunk, or basement because museums and historic sites have not been ready to display them respectfully? How many of those relate to the experiences of enslaved Africans?

These stories shaped my thinking as I considered the use of artifacts in my exhibit. Unfortunately, I did not have the time or resources that Bunch and the NMAAHC had to track down material culture relating directly to the house or its enslaved occupants. While there are surviving manuscripts and records of Black occupants of the Shirley-Eustis House, written documents alone do not hold the same meanings or have the same impact as three dimensional artifacts in an exhibition. These documents are most often from the perspective of white, wealthy colonists, while physical artifacts were used directly by enslaved people. The history documents and objects carry is the same, but the perspectives they offer on that history are vastly different. Even neighborhood oral histories, which provide us with engaging ideas of how the house’s story has evolved over time and connect us to individuals’ experiences and stories, have a different impact on visitors than material culture.

It was Suzy Buchanan, the house’s Executive Director, who inspired my ideas for how we might incorporate artifacts into an exhibition on the site’s African American histories. She first mentioned that a large iron washing kettle sat in the basement of the Shirley-Eustis House, right in front of the public restrooms. While it was not original to the house, she qualified, it could at least serve to illustrate some of the work likely performed by enslaved people in the eighteenth century. If that was reasonable, she said, I could include it in my exhibit. I could hardly contain my excitement. There was one part of my problem rather expertly solved.

Immediately I realized that the Shirley-Eustis House also had an unexpectedly large collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century historical tools and gardening equipment in the attic of our carriage house. While we may not have been able to tell the stories of those enslaved at the house directly through surviving artifacts, we could still use items in our collection to interpret their lives. It is important to note that there are limitations to using nineteenth century artifacts to interpret eighteenth century events – much changed over that century regarding labor and enslavement. Interpreting these artifacts is still worthwhile, even if I acknowledge their weaknesses in my interpretation. In this concrete experience, I realized the importance of a detailed and up to date collections catalogue and the interpretive possibilities that can result.

An 18^th or 19^th century wooden mortar and pestle in the collections at the Shirley-Eustis House. These and other kitchen tools illustrate the constant labor required in operating a household like the Shirley family’s in colonial Massachusetts. Photo taken by the author.

Two yokes for human use dating to the 18^th or 19^th century found in the collections at the Shirley-Eustis House. These two objects illustrate the human labor that went into daily operations at the house, even though they are not original to the house itself. Photo taken by the author.

Suzy also reminded me that we at the Shirley-Eustis House are not isolated from other museums. One benefit of designing an online exhibit is the potential to use collections beyond your own by linking other sites’ collections into the digital exhibit. Considering this option helped me realize that creating a rich and informative site on the history of enslavement is my priority for this exhibit, not simply drawing visitors to the Shirley-Eustis House and its unique resources alone. If our exhibit leads visitors to another site with more relevant artifacts, then I have done my job well.

The dispersion of artifacts from the Shirley-Eustis House likely occurred due to changing ownership, renovation, and repeated episodes of the house’s disrepair. It may be impossible to know what became of the site’s original eighteenth century artifacts, but this does not render its staff incapable of interpreting a broader history of the house and its residents, including its laborers. I hope that my exhibit does justice to the lives of enslaved Africans and their roles in local and national histories.

[1] https://sah.columbia.edu/content/prizes/tony-horwitz-prize/2021-lonnie-g-bunch-iii

[2] Vinson Cunningham, “Making a Home for Black History,” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/analyzing-the-national-museum-of-african-american-history-and-culture.

[3] Vinson Cunningham, “Making a Home for Black History.”

December 16, 2021Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

The Significance of an Individual: Developing Exhibits in Historic House Museums

By Meghan Arends

Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site. Photograph taken upon my initial visit in August.

Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site is owned and operated by the National Park Service. Built in 1759, the Georgian style house became the headquarters of George Washington during the Siege of Boston in 1775. It eventually became the home of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when it was bought by his father-in-law as a wedding gift.[1] From then on, the house became an important center of politics, society, and the arts.

The estate drew me in because of my interest in material culture. The collections held at the Longfellow House are numerous and diverse, representing the vast culture the family had the privilege of experiencing during their time. My internship here offered me a satisfying and richly challenging professional experience that expands past encounters with collections.

My overall internship goals were both practical and intellectual. In-depth research of extended family member Brevet Captain Nathan Appleton Jr. for the upcoming temporary exhibit “Longfellow Family in the Civil War” sat at the center of my experience. This involved familiar tasks, including online and off-site research into Nathan’s life, writing exhibit labels for artifacts and, eventually, producing web content to further expand upon his life as a Union soldier. This project required an intense focus on a singular subject and his place within the broader American history, which I don’t always get the chance to explore. Rather than generalized concepts and assumptions, an individual’s history can reveal their impact on the world and vise-versa.

Photographs of Brevet Captain Nathan Appleton Jr., “Appleton Family Papers,” Massachusetts Historical Society. Left: Nathan as a Harvard Student, shortly before entering the war. Right: Nathan after initial enlistment in 1863 as 2nd Lieutenant. Photographs courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The most exciting part of the internship was certainly the weeklong research trip I took to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which maintains the Appleton Family Papers. Hundreds of documents shed light on the life of Nathan and his family in the years surrounding and including the Civil War. The richness and extent of the resources meant that I had to prioritize materials within the extensive collection. I had to determine which sources were most important to the themes and questions of my project, putting others aside. Previous research endeavors have never offered me such a volume of sources. My week spent at MHS taught me the importance of guiding themes in a research project, which is relevant for both historians and public historians.

The professional and practical aspects of the internship are among its greatest rewards, especially the communication and networking opportunities I’ve had with professionals in the field of public history. I attended weekly meetings with the rest of the site staff; they’ve provided an invaluable glance into the world of historic sites and their daily operations. The isolation of an internship can make it seem like the project you’re working on is the only one, but in reality, there are dozens of programs in development simultaneously. Nothing has expanded my personal field of public history knowledge more than hearing from other staff members about the various projects they are working on each day and their contributions to the site’s significance. A historic site can’t rely on one program or strategy to maintain relevance and interest. Diversity in programming and site history helps them serve multiple audiences and their needs.

The internship offered me opportunities to work on new skills, such as writing labels for exhibits. My natural instinct as a historian is to take my time crafting an argument and presenting evidence. That luxury isn’t available when writing exhibit labels, where you must communicate significance and meaning in relatively few words. General introductions that can’t explain the significance of an artifact in the context of the exhibit provide little substance for the audience. We read Beverly Serrell’s guide, Exhibit Labels, in class, but now I’ve had the chance to put her advice into practice and take on the challenges of writing exhibit text to tell stories and connect the past and present.[2] This is done all within 100 words written for the public, not scholars.

Process of writing and editing exhibit labels. 1. A short narrative with a list of the medals (too long) 2. A more narrative approach 3. Revision after separating a medal, requiring a new title 4. Continuous edits that create an interpretive narrative rather than just a list of facts

It’s inspiring to think that the work I’m currently doing isn’t just for a grade in a class. Instead, I hope to leave a mark on my field, to teach people and help them connect to the lives of this family. Eventually, this project will become part of a larger exhibit that will open in the spring of 2022. My work is not yet finished, as I will be helping with the design and execution of that larger exhibit for my capstone project next semester. I’m looking forward to identifying more stories that answer questions, inspire new ones, and entertain the public while pushing them to consider new ideas in the ever-evolving databank that is our history.

[1] Beverly Serrell, Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 1996), 19.

[2] “Longfellow House Washington’s Headquarters,” Home Page, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/long/index.htm.

November 9, 2021Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Internship: Archives, Virtual Reality, and the Preservation of Memory

By Meghan Arends

Technological advancements present new opportunities within education, both in classrooms and in public settings. The world of Virtual Reality introduces a unique method of interaction with history, something that has inspired Greenhouse Studios at the University of Connecticut. One of their most recent projects, temporarily titled “Courtroom 600,” is an educational experience that combines the video game technology and archival sources to give players a firsthand look at the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials. By using actual evidence and testimony documented from the case, Greenhouse Studios aims to present the historical truth to students, museumgoers, and gamers in an effort to keep collective memory of the Holocaust alive at a time most paramount.

I began working with the Courtroom 600 team as a graduate archives intern this past summer. Since the internship was remote, my work focused on digital archives rather than within a traditional repository. I previously had very little experience in the field of digital archives, but with the help of my supervisor, I became well-versed in metadata, Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, and HOCR. This is because the game uses documents from the Thomas J. Dodd Papers, held at the UConn Archives & Special Collections, to narrate the story of the Holocaust. Players will discover these documents as clues in the game, building the story as they go. These documents will need to be collected and interpreted for the sake of gameplay, and the program will link players to each document’s original listing on the digital repository. Therefore, I was editing useable and searchable data to prepare these documents for use within Courtroom 600.

A comparison between the OCR generated by Tesseract and the corrected product. German names were often difficult for Tesseract to recognize, and inconsistencies in the typewriter’s printing created numerous errors. This image comes from a presentation I gave at the CTDA Annual Meeting in June.

OCR is essentially a transcript of what is on a document. The University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections uses a program called Tesseract, which reads each page of an archived document and generates a read-out of the text. This transcript is then visible to users of the digital repository within the book viewer of the document. Meanwhile, HOCR is an HTML version of OCR used to make a document searchable. HOCR doesn’t just read what’s on the document; it maps out the content, generating bounding boxes around each word to highlight searches. As we learned over time, OCR and HOCR both generate from the original object but do so separately. We were unable to find a way to intertwine the editing processes, so I had to use an XML editor to display and edit the HOCR. The issue with automatically generating OCR and HOCR is that they’re not always accurate, especially when originating from documents created on older technology like the typewriters used during the trials. Errors typical to typewriters (i.e., letters typed over letters to correct typos and mechanical issues) create errors in the transcripts.

Unlike computers, we can recognize the actions and errors of other humans. Approximately half of my time during this internship was spent correcting the OCR. This was done within Islandora, the program used to build the digital repository, and was relatively simple. It was tedious at times, especially when an error was continuously made during the original generation, but that time was mostly spent correcting typos and focusing on consistency for line spacing and the characters used. This was a learning process, as we were still just experimenting within the program. The other half of my time was then spent updating the HOCR, though not just the typos. The bounding box coordinates had to be checked and adjusted to create an accurate map of the page. I also helped update descriptive metadata for individual pages, once again aiding their searchability, but the main purpose of this internship was to help develop and streamline the editing process so that it could be passed on to future interns and assistants with near flawless execution

An example of HOCR being edited in Notepad++, an XML editor. The numbers proceeding “bbox” correspond to the word’s position on the page, creating a box to highlight each word during a search

OCR and HOCR exist for an important reason: to make archival sources fully accessible to researchers. These documents are supposed to provide an enriching experience to gameplayers, who are meant to interpret the sources to fully understand the gravity of the situation. The HOCR obviously has to be accurate to what is on each page to make it searchable. If it isn’t edited and is instead left with numerous errors that come from computer generation, the search feature becomes inoperative and pointless. Leaving inaccurate OCR just creates confusion and inconsistency. As I learned, the necessity of accuracy holds greater significance than just providing tools for use. With this internship, I witnessed the practical application of archives and the significance they can provide. One of the primary purposes of archives is to preserve historical truth for future generations to utilize. Archives are essential keepers of public memory and can be vital tools for communities, educators, and activists. The job of the archivist is to preserve and document these truths and to aid researchers in its discovery, or rediscovery. To provide any information to the public that is not truly accurate to the original source is to provide false information.

There is, unfortunately, a deeply rooted history of denial when it comes to the Holocaust. Despite best efforts to punish those who committed such atrocities, anti-Semitic sentiments always linger. When I ponder the importance of Courtroom 600 and these documents, I think of swastikas spray-painted on walls, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and the tragic vandalization of monuments meant for mourning. These documents are actual evidence used during the trials. They are representations of the truth that historians and archivists are continuously working to keep within the light to work against misinformation and hate. Editing metadata and transcriptions is necessary; to provide anything less than full accuracy is a misrepresentation of the truth. Even if it’s out of pure ignorance, it is alteration of the facts. My job was certainly to make research easier for users of the repository and to prepare a polished product for use in the game, but my job was to also ensure that, no matter what public users look at or what feature they use, the truth of what occurred during that period would be visible. I learned during this internship that within archives, there’s a responsibility to the moral significance that comes with accessioning and processing historical artifacts. Each step of the archival process must consider what each artifact represents to specific groups. Doing so only helps to serve the communities we help preserve.