An Intern's Perspective

This was written by Simmons student, Colleen Mahoney. Today is her last day of her internship. Many thanks for all her hard work.

When people ask me what I’m going to school for, and I tell them I’m studying to be an archivist, I usually get blank stares back.  A what?  My stock response has become, “You know, like the girl in National Treasure,” which usually gets people far more excited.  Sometimes I feel a bit misleading for comparing my future career with a character from an adventure movie.  But spending this past semester as an intern at the Congregational Library has helped me realize that my explanation really isn’t that far from the truth.

My first project this semester was preparing a new collection the Library purchased so that it would be available for use.  The Reverend Henry Boynton was a traveling Congregational minister who served churches in New York, Vermont, and Connecticut in the decades leading up to the Civil War.  This collection included dozens of his handwritten sermons, each annotated with the dates and places where it was delivered.   These sermons were by far the oldest documents I had ever handled at that point, and I was a bit awed reading through Boynton’s sermons supporting abolition and temperance.  Their subject matter serves as a reminder of our nation’s past, and the importance of preserving our history.

One of my other projects this semester involved going through the archive’s “Small Collections.”  Small Collections is the group of individual items that the CL has collected that don’t belong in a larger group—individual letters, journals, sermons, and the like.  In some cases, the archive has since acquired larger collections that individual items can be integrated with, or they would better serve our patrons by being located in another section.  Going through each item and deciding where to relocate it to was in many ways like a treasure hunt.  There was also an incredibly wide range of materials in this collection—the autograph collection of a nineteenth century minister which included the signatures of such figures as Thomas Jefferson and Lyman Beecher, a letter from British Prime Minister David Lloyd George following World War I in which he encouraged greater cooperation between American and British ministers, and the financial records of a colonial Congregational minister who kept meticulous track of his expenditures.

There may not be any high speed chases or life-or-death crises at the Congregational Library, but the opportunity to help preserve this important aspect of American history has been an exciting opportunity.  I may be in the minority, but I would take a collection of sermons eloquently addressing real problems our nation faced over a treasure map any day.

Comments

[Kathryn]

Ms. Mahoney--Thank you for such an eloquent explanation of your internship. I am one of those who would have asked you what an archivist does, so it was great to learn more from someone whose writing is so enjoyable to read.