Posted on No Comments on Internship: Archives, Virtual Reality, and the Preservation of Memory

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The University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections uses a program called Tesseract, which reads each page of an archived document and generates a read-out of the text.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.

Upper left: an example of the documents I worked with. Upper right: an example of what OCR looks like from an editor’s point of view. Lower left: Search results using HOCR mapping. Lower right: Text transcript of document generated by OCR. Images courtesy of the Connecticut Digital Archive.
Posted on No Comments on Internship: “Ways We Couldn’t Even Imagine”: Artists-in-Residence at Historic Sites, no. 1

Internship: “Ways We Couldn’t Even Imagine”: Artists-in-Residence at Historic Sites, no. 1

By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

Public History student Rebecca Beit-Aharon offers the first of a series of three blog posts reflecting on her internship experience.
A framed crayon portrait of a faceless Black man in fashionable 18th century clothing standing at an open door.
“Cyrus Bruce” by Richard Haynes Jr. is currently on display at Historic New England’s Eustis Estate in Milton, MA in “Artful Stories: Paintings from Historic New England.” Image courtesy Historic New England.

In Summer 2018, Historic New England’s Governor John Langdon House in Portsmouth, NH and the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail invited artist Richard Haynes Jr. to make an invisible man visible. Haynes served as Langdon’s artist-in-residence to create a portrait of Cyrus Bruce, a formerly enslaved Black man with a “gentlemanly appearance” who worked for Governor Langdon in the late 1700s. Haynes studied written sources, historical artifacts, and the Langdon House itself to bring Bruce to life.1

Before and after, the Langdon House has brought in other artists-in-residence. The success of Haynes’ residency showed just how powerful contemporary art at historic sites can be: the Langdon House found a community partner in the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail; a previously hidden history has been revealed; and bringing in a Black artist to showcase a Black historic figure increased its modern diversity as well. Ken Turino, Manager of Community Partnerships and Resource Development at Historic New England, was particularly impressed.

AIR programs at historic sites aren’t new or particularly uncommon, but there’s surprisingly little information available about actually running one. Different sites will naturally have different needs and capabilities, but the state of the field so far has generally been that each site ends up reinventing the wheel—with varying degrees of success.

In this display in Mining the Museum, “Metalwork 1793–1880,” Wilson places a silver service with iron slave shackles. The wealth of white Marylanders who owned such silver services depended on the enslavement of Black Africans and African-Americans. Image courtesy Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): 157.

I started working with Ken Turino in August 2020 as a Community Engagement Research Intern to research existing and former AIR programs at historic sites with the goal of creating a set of industry best practices. We’ll be presenting our findings at at least one industry conference (AASLH 2021, here we come! Our panel will be on Friday, September 24 from 11am–12:15pm); making our materials—sample contracts, e.g.—available to the public; and (hopefully) submitting our findings for publication.

My background reading began with Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, an arresting 1992–93 exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society. Mining the Museum swept the industry with its curatorial critique of the museum’s dominant narrative. Rather than maintain the veneer of separation in the regular collection, Wilson juxtaposed artifacts reflecting upper-class white history with their antecedent: artifacts of enslavement.2 His exhibit exemplifies what AIR programs can do: bring untold stories to light, incorporate diverse voices into historic sites and museums, and push historic institutions to rethink how they tell history.

A photograph of wooden statues of a cluster of Black children in front of church pews.
“The Children of Whitney” by Woodrow Nash. Courtesy of Whitney Plantation Museum.

Public historians today continue to echo Wilson’s message as we reframe history at sites like the Whitney Plantation and Slave Museum in Edgard, LA. Visitors’ introduction to the plantation and slave museum is through contemporary art in a historic building: sculptor Woodrow Nash’s “The Children of Whitney” grabs your attention when you enter the restored 1870 Antioch Baptist Church, built by emancipated African-Americans in nearby Paulina, LA after the Civil War.3 “The Children of Whitney” represent real Black children at the time of emancipation through the work of a Black artist, giving multiple generations voice.

Of course, not all AIR programs are equally successful: The Cut, a 2015 week-long public excavation at the site of the Warsaw ghetto run by Turkish artist-in-residence Aslı Çavuşoğlu at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, has had no lasting impact. In a 2020 review, Maria Magdalena Dembek argues that The Cut failed to evoke a shift in perspective among audience members or encourage an evaluation of its host museum’s narrative. POLIN actively leans away from interpreting the Holocaust, instead focusing on the life of Polish Jews—perhaps, as Dembek suggests, to “avoid critical discussion of the cultural mechanisms behind the Holocaust, mainly anti-Semitism in its local, Polish variant.”4 Despite the facts that Çavuşoğlu’s work was directly located in and conducted by the community and that he needed POLIN’s support to conduct his project at all, The Cut seems to have existed in a vacuum. Çavuşoğlu’s project was thoughtful and promising, but at the end of the day, a blip is a blip.

“Sheep Is Life” by JoAnne Doshier, 2008 Artist-in-Residence at Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. Watercolor on paper. Courtesy of NPS.

POLIN in Poland, MHS in Maryland—historic sites run AIR programs around the globe, but as English-speaking Americans, Ken and I have tended to focus on American historic sites. Of the fifty-five relevant programs that we initially identified, fifty-one are in the United States. One major source of AIR programs was the National Park Service, though the interactive map listing their AIR programs is woefully out-of-date. The map lists programs that current employees have never heard of, such as at Boston National Historic Park, and omits many current programs, including Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site in Apache County, AZ, which has run its AIR program on a limited basis since 2007.5 And I only looked at the historic sites on the map—never mind the non-historic ones!

The NPS’ unhelpful masterlist is illustrative of two larger issues for AIR programs at historic sites: public awareness and confusion. AIR programs are often under-advertised; sometimes, opportunities are only posted on the site’s website, meaning that only artists aware of an individual site (and AIR programs in general) have a chance of knowing where to look. Additionally, “artist-in-residence” means multiple things. Our research focuses on AIR programs where the artwork and the artistic process is engages with the site of the residency, but there are other similarly-named programs—historically called artist colonies, a term currently being retired throughout the industry—that serve as retreats for artists to create without engaging with the host site. Not only is this difference poorly explained in available literature, but I haven’t found anywhere that treats them as separate types of programs. Even within the NPS, both types of programs are advertised under the same name (artist-in-residence program) with no way to distinguish them beyond looking at each individual site webpage.6 The same holds true on the Alliance of Artists Communities website, the biggest online clearing house for AIR programs.7 Clarity, communication, and openness are important first steps for historic sites with AIR programs, a finding continuously reinforced in the next phase of research: interviews.

Check back for the next installment, where I’ll talk about interviewing artists and site administrators—and more lessons learned.

Footnotes

1. “Video: How Richard Haynes creates a portrait,” Historic New England, August 14, 2020, https://www.historicnewengland.org/how-richard-haynes-creates-a-portrait/

2. Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): 151–72, accessed August 5, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25007622; and Noralee Frankel, “Review: Mining the Museum by Fred Wilson,” The Public Historian 15, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 105–108, accessed August 5, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3378741.

3. Jessica Marie Johnson, “Time, Space, and Memory at Whitney Plantation,” Black Perspectives (blog), African American Intellectual History Society, March 14, 2015, https://www.aaihs.org/time-space-and-memory-at-the-whitney-plantation/; “The Children of the Whitney,” Whitney Plantation, accessed April 12, 2021, https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/the-big-house-and-the-outbuildings/the-children-of-the-whitney; “The Antioch Baptist Church,” Whitney Plantation, accessed April 12, 2021, https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/the-big-house-and-the-outbuildings/the-antioch-baptist-church.

4. Maria Magdalena Dembek, “Archaeological fever: situating participatory art in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto,” Holocaust Studies 26, no. 2 (2020): 202, accessed August 5, 2020, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.umb.edu/10.1080/17504902.2019.1578458.

5. “Be an Artist-in-Residence,” Arts in the Parks, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/arts/air.htm; “Artist in Residence,” Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/hutr/getinvolved/artist-in-residence.htm.

6. Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site’s Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Program in Danville, CA is a performing arts residency where the works produced do not need to be related to the site; on the other hand, Harpers Ferry National Historic Park’s AIR program in Harpers Ferry, WV requires artists to create work relevant to the site. See “Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Program & Travis Bogard Day-Use Program,” Eugene O’Neill Foundation, accessed April 11, 2021, http://www.eugeneoneill.org/artist-in-residence-program; “Artist in Residence,” Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/hafe/getinvolved/artist-in-residence.htm.

7. “Residencies,” Alliance of Artists Communities, accessed April 11, 2021, https://artistcommunities.org.

Posted on 1 Comment on Internship: A Fresh Perspective on Local History

Internship: A Fresh Perspective on Local History

By Tom Begley

We rarely have the opportunity to learn a city’s history through the perspectives of women. Until recently, the everyday lives and achievements of women have not been well documented or celebrated, silenced or pushed to the margins. Since the mid-20th century, historians and public history institutions have increasingly worked to fix this, searching the records and highlighting stories of women and other marginalized populations. During my internship with Lighting the Way: Historic Women of the South Coast (LTW) I worked on a new educational tool for the program and in the process learned important pieces of the history of New Bedford, Massachusetts through the inspiring stories of women of the city. It became clear how the city was shaped by their activism, organization, and passion to improve their communities.

Since 2018, the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s initiative LTW has highlighted women from Massachusetts’ South Coast, the region stretching from Cape Cod to the Rhode Island border. LTW seeks “to explore the impact of historical women from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds throughout history” by “unearthing remarkable stories of women’s callings that required grit, tenacity, and enduring commitment to their families, careers and communities,” (www.historicwomensouthcoast.org). With thought provoking programs, online profiles, a mobile app, educator and school group resources, walking tours, forums, public art displays, and community civic engagement campaigns, LTW invites people to learn about their local history through the stories of women.

Lighting the Way. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Working with LTW coordinator Cathy Saunders, my project was to create a mobile tour driven by an overarching narrative to explore a specific theme in the city’s history. Rhode Tour, a joint initiative between Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Brown University’s Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and Rhode Island Historical Society, will host the tour. Rhode Tour is a smartphone app and website that brings stories and tours to the palm of the user in an engaging display, (www.rhodetour.org). The platform also serves as a digital exhibit space presenting “big ideas” and telling history through multimedia, essays, and links to additional resources such as articles and videos. Joining Rhode Tour will extend LTW’s reach and mission to the thousands of users who access the website and app each year.

I began my work by identifying themes in the collection of 100 profiles of women available on the LTW website. LTW intends to connect the tour to Massachusetts civic curriculum standards. With this in mind the long tradition of women activists and organizers started to become apparent. From abolitionists to PTA members to elected officials, women have worked to improve their South Coast communities and beyond. This realization brought us to the theme for the tour – “Organizing New Bedford: The Women Who Mobilized Change.”

Creating a shortlist of potential tour stops was the first hurdle to overcome. Rhode Tour suggests 6-8 stops and with so many fascinating LTW stories it was hard to choose only a handful of women to feature. To narrow the list and meet the requirement we established a set of criteria. We looked for women who spent the majority of their careers in New Bedford, motivated others to create change, and had several types of multimedia available to help tell the story. Through conversations with Cathy and LTW advisory committee members, the list eventually met the target with 6 tour stops highlighting the work of 7 women: Elizabeth Carter Brooks, Jennie Horne, Rosalind Poll Brooker, Rosemary Tierney, Eula Mendes, Polly Johnson, and Mary Santos Barros.

The Lighting the Way website (www.historicwomensouthcoast.org) features over 100 profiles of South Coast women, education resources, and a self-guided walking tour. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum.

After selecting the women, we sought appropriate locations for each tour stop. Some were readily apparent such as New Bedford City Hall for Rosalind Poll Brooker and Rosemary Tierney, the first women elected City Councilor and mayor, respectively. Others were more difficult because the places associated with the stories no longer exist or have become private residences. The textile mill where strike leader Eula Mendes worked has been torn down, as was the community center Jennie Horne directed. We also had to consider the current status of neighborhoods and whether it was appropriate to encourage people to visit. The historic areas of the city are surrounded by active neighborhoods and we wanted to be respectful of residents’ privacy. For guidance I turned to people more familiar with the city than me.

The final step was to write each tour stop. The existing LTW profiles served as the foundation as I added new information and reshaped text to focus on the aspect of the woman’s life that exemplified our theme of organizing for change. The realities of researching women’s history were uncovered during this stage. Sources are limited, yet by looking closely at the silences stories start to emerge. We also had the great fortune of connecting with family members who provided a wealth of information about their mothers that wasn’t available otherwise.

The content experts involved with LTW were all incredibly gracious with their time and knowledge as I worked on the project. In particular Jan da Silva (New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park), Lee Blake (New Bedford Historical Society), Mary Smoyer (Boston Women’s Heritage Trail), and Ann O’Leary (NBWM Emily Bourne Research Fellow) provided detailed notes on appropriate locations and storylines to include in the tour. Overall, I owe my positive experience to Cathy Saunders who guided me through the process and shared her public history expertise to ensure that I considered the many different factors in order to properly share these women’s stories.

Recently, one of the LTW committee members, a lifelong resident of New Bedford, shared that she loves her city and was thrilled to see this “Organizing New Bedford” tour bring long deserved attention to the work these women did to make the city a better place. I hope others from New Bedford feel the same way and that this project may inspire students to get involved in issues important to them. It was an honor to work on this project and play a small part in furthering LTW’s educational mission. Not only did I enjoy sharpening my skills as a public history practitioner, but as a student of history, it was especially impactful to learn about New Bedford through the deeds of these amazing women.

Posted on 1 Comment on Internship: Cold War Cassin Young

Internship: Cold War Cassin Young

By Charles Borsos

Standing on the stern of Cassin Young, trying to remember the specifications and history of the specific equipment installed behind me, my teeth were chattering. Park Ranger and internship supervisor Eric Hanson Plass and I spent the morning filming all around the ship which was closed for the winter. This gave us free reign to set up our camera without fear of getting in anyone’s way. It also meant we could step over the signs marked “closed to the public” without a curious visitor trying to follow and take the camera into the spaces normally unseen.

Still image from video shot by Eric Hanson Plass, of intern Charlie Borsos at the stern of Cassin Young in Charlestown, Dec 2, 2020

Closing for the winter meant it was cold on the ship. Not just the wind coming off the harbor but the bare steel of the ship itself was cold and sucked the heat off any part of the body idly leaning against it. It reminded me of the crewmen’s firsthand accounts of serving on the ship, and their gratitude for the simple installation of tile in particular spaces in the 1950s.

 “It really made a big difference because when you got up in the morning, and slapped your flat feet out on that cold, clammy, wet steel deck in the morning, you couldn’t hardly stand up because of the condensation from everybody breathing,” said yeoman Theodore G. Johndrow, one of the last crewmen to leave the ship in 1960, interviewed in 1983. Combining interviews like these with the interpretation of the spaces within Cassin Young, allows visitors to understand the experience of the destroyer’s “being cold” instead of a simple fact.

In many ways, our winter film shoot capped hours of my research on the process of adapting a ship built to fight WWII for continued service during the much changed circumstances of the Cold War. The video, along with text, oral history excerpts and photographs, will complete the final section—“Modernizing the Fleet”—of the National Park Service’s web application, Ship of Steel, Spirits of Iron: The Stories of USS Cassin Young and the Charlestown Navy Yard.

Intern Charlie Borsos in front of “hedgehog launcher” on Cassin Young, Dec 2, 2020.

Because of the pandemic, I have conducted most of my research online, and indeed, the final product will be virtual.  We shot the film during my second visit to the ship, which I had come to know intimately on paper, but not in real life.  Despite this “remoteness,” my goal is to connect the history and the stories to the site; the opportunity to film on-site, after months of remote research and writing, has given clarity to some of the developing themes.

The documentary evidence, for example, revealed that the barbershop was the segregated quarters on the ship during the war. These destroyers were designed in the 1930s when the Navy and indeed much of the United States was segregated, and the predominantly Black and Filipino sailors of color who served on board Navy ships were relegated to serving as stewards’ mates and cooks. Experiencing the physical space onboard Cassin Young reveals that this space for their berthing, away from the main space for the white crew, is accessed from the white crew’s berthing by going through the chow line and up a set of stairs physically removed from the rest of the crew and stuck in another compartment. It reinforces within the very structure of the ship the racial separation within the Navy during WWII.

This process of thinking about the history as tied to space on Cassin Young, and also considering those spaces as areas where men worked and lived are crucial interpretive lessons that shape my continued work on text and voice overs for the video. The new equipment used to search for enemy submarines in the 1950s were not just vacuum tubes capable of hearing a certain level of decibel from a certain range. The experience of the man stationed at a radar scope in the middle of the night as Cassin Young made its way across the Atlantic on a goodwill visit to the Mediterranean attaches layers of meanings to this technology. These technologies don’t live on their own, they are part of a ship and the lives of the ship’s crew; what can seem like minutiae can be woven into a richer fabric strongly attached to the interpretive site.

USN Escort Ship fires similar weapon, Dec 18, 1944, Court. USN
Posted on No Comments on Going Virtual: Museum Education During COVID-19

Going Virtual: Museum Education During COVID-19

By Kaylee Redard, Public History

Garden view of the exterior of The House of the Seven Gables. The house was built in 1668 by John Turner, a wealthy Salem merchant. Courtesy of The House of the Seven Gables website.

The House of the Seven Gables, a non-profit historic site in Salem, Massachusetts, is dedicated to preserving the past and continuing the American story.  It is both an international tourist attraction as well as a community resource, particularly for the immigrant population in Salem.  Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 the historic houses on site are closed to the public and, like many other museums, they are limited to running a few programs virtually in summer 2020.  This has made my internship an interesting and challenging experience.

The global pandemic greatly influenced and shaped my internship, both in content and practice.  I was tasked with evaluating remote museum education programs during COVID-19, and to use this data to propose redesign of a Gables face-to-face school program–Naumkeag Settlers to Salem Shippers—as a virtual program.

Some of the items used in the on-site Naumkeag Settlers to Salem Shippers program, including a cone of sugar. Courtesy of The House of the Seven Gables website.

Naumkeag Settlers to Salem Shippers is a school program for grades two through five that is designed to engage students in learning about colonial life during a visit to The House of the Seven Gables.  Traditionally, this program begins by introducing three 17th century children: Jehoden Palfrey, the daughter of one of the original colonists of Salem, John Turner II, who was the son of a wealthy Salem merchant, and an Irish indentured servant named Joan Sullivan.  The students are then divided into groups to do activities, directed by historical interpreters, around the historic site.  These activities include a brief tour of The House of the Seven Gables, a wool carding activity, learning about colonial food, and lastly, playing with colonial toys.  Once the students have gone through all the activities they regroup for a concluding discussion.  The entire program is very hands-on and makes use of the entire site to accommodate large groups of children.  My job was to propose a way to make this hands-on, face-to-face program into an engaging virtual experience. 

To do this I needed to become more informed about the current state of the museum education field and learn about remote school programming.  First, I reached out to the museum education community to see how other sites were adjusting their programs in response to COVID-19.  I contacted eleven different museums and historic institutions, including Historic Beverly, Salem Maritime National Historic Site, and the USS Constitution Museum, and asked if they would be willing to share how they are doing programming during COVID-19.  I received enthusiastic responses and quickly arranged meetings over Zoom or phone with everyone who was available.

In these meetings, I posed four questions:

  • What programs did you run before COVID-19?
  • Have you changed any of these programs to make them accessible during the pandemic?
  • What feedback have you received about these programs?
  • Did your institution work with teachers when making changes to their education programs?  

Everyone was planning different ways to engage with their visitors of all ages.  Most programs were geared toward students and families, but a few have been for the general public.  Since my focus was on school programs, I tried to keep the conversation on those, but I was excited to hear everyone’s plans.

Every professional colleague had imaginative ideas on how to reach out to their community.  These conversations helped me envision the program I wanted to build.   Discussions on how to present content in an engaging way while on the other side of a screen, or which platform has worked best for connecting with students, were helpful in determining which way my project went.

Undertaking my internship during COVID-19 was challenging, but it offered me unexpected and rewarding opportunities. I had not expected making such broad connections with professionals in the field during an internship—I came to look forward to each of these meetings not only because it was a chance to talk to someone in the midst of quarantine, but because of the opportunities for professional development and building a network of colleagues.

I also learned the importance of flexibility. To communicate with colleagues and my site supervisor, I had to make sure that my schedule was as flexible as possible to accommodate the different forms of communication and time boundaries of multiple hectic schedules.  With the weekly, if not daily, change in regulations surrounding COVID-19, many museums, including The House of the Seven Gables, have had to change guidelines without much notice.  This can drastically alter staff schedules and limit contact time. I have learned two other crucial lessons from this internship: the importance of patience, with people and technology, and time management, because you never know what will come next during this pandemic. I am looking forward to hopefully implementing my proposal for a virtual Naumkeag Settlers to Salem Shippers program and the potential for other remote programs that result from this experience.