Internship at Skagit Valley College

After completing this project I find that there are some skills that I would like to work on further, this includes digitizing material. I found it hard to try and capture the contents of material while making the scanned image as professional and presentable as possible. Some of the materials were books or booklets so there is some warping of the pages and black spots on the edges of the images which I feel that someone who is more experienced in digitizing materials might be better at leaving out. I also want to work more on the creation of metadata and using different standards to create metadata. This was also feedback that my site supervisor provided to me. However, I do feel that I learned a lot about digitizing and the process of creating standards and policies about collection description and organization. I believe that I did a good job at using the organization for the college itself and reflecting that in the organization of the archive. I also think that once I got the hang of creating the metadata for each item I was better able to describe materials and create descriptions that would be useful to end users. I do think that it would have been useful to have some experience in a classroom setting with a professor to guide me on the practical applications of these concepts. 

During the re-organization process and the work to streamline the taxonomy, hierarchy and call number schema I put considerable effort into making the archive more accessible for all of the students, staff and faculty that operate out of the Skagit Valley College. I was able to do this by analyzing the college’s community and their specific needs. People who are interested in researching the specific student publications can focus on just those publications without having to sift through the academic publications and the administration publications. Then I was able to make the archival material more accessible to those users who are not able to physically come to the library and request to see the archival material. Since the archive is not advertised to the public and is in a section of the library that is open to non-staff members, users must request to see materials from the archive. By digitizing the materials and making the files accessible to the public using the library’s current system users are able to search for and find the materials. Adding identifiers to the digital files like the metadata and call numbers I created, allows for even more opportunities of searchability and findability. 

Looking back on the project as a whole, we were able to accomplish all of the goals that we set out to complete however the scope of the project did change a bit as we worked through it. For instance, I was able to finish the inventory, create the new taxonomy system and call number schema and was able to digitize material. The amount of material that I digitized changed and the amount of digitized files I was able to upload for users to find also changed. The cause of this was a mixture of the software systems we were using and the amount of work that I could do within a 10 week period. In the end, this was an internship that I really appreciated getting the chance to take part in. I will definitely be using the knowledge on digitization, taxonomy systems, and project management for my coursework. Particularly my capstone which will be focusing on archives and how they operate in rural settings. I was also able to get experience working in an academic library which is an experience I had really wanted to gain. I am overall very happy with the knowledge and experience gained from this internship.

The collection of material that I worked to digitize, describe and organize can be found on the Skagit Valley College Historical Collection website at: https://cdm16448.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/search.