I hope everyone is doing great in this holiday season. This week I began an internship with a local historical society and I though I would document my experience here on my blog!
I worked ten hours this week in two days and so far I have been cataloging books in the PastPerfect system. I wasn't given any training in the system so I just looked through other entries and based my entries on what I saw in the system. This is a local historical society, so perhaps things could be a little more professional, but there is only one paid employee and everything else is run by volunteers.
At my internship location, there is a room full of rare and locally relevant books that have been partially cataloged, so I have been going through and finding what hasn't yet been cataloged and cataloging the remaining items. So far, after ten hours of work, I have completed about two and a half book shelves out of the ten or so in the room.
Cataloging can be a little tedious but the fact that these books are a bunch of rare and locally relevant titles that I have never come across before, it's actually pretty interesting too. This week I wish I had taken German in high school instead of Spanish. I live in Missouri, where we have historically had a very large German population. So far I have come across a handful of books written in German and I have to get on the internet and translate a bunch of stuff just to figure out the basics on a book, such as the author, publishing co., etc. That's interesting but also somewhat frustrating.
Some of the books are in pretty bad shape, with their covers falling off and pages really damaged, but most are not bad.
So far, this first week has been pretty much what I expected cataloging would be like.
Stay tuned for other updates after the holidays. Christmas and New Years weeks my boss is on vacation, so I won't be at the historical society, but hopefully I can remember to check back on my blog once I get back into the internship experience.
Thanks for reading!
