My Summer in the Archives: My Internship with the East Carolina Manuscript Collection
As a graduate student in the public history concentration, I am always looking for ways that the public interacts with history in its many forms. Working with ECU’s East Carolina Manuscript Collection helped me build my skills in making the history contained within archives accessible to the public. My summer internship with ECU’s Manuscripts and Digital Curation department was designed to combine on-site work with physical collections and virtual work with born-digital collections. I began my physical collections work with the Lee R. “Roy” Hardee, Jr. Papers (ECMC #1161), a very large collection that includes thousands of photographs. I was tasked with processing and rehousing photos created ca. 1950-1972, during the time Roy Hardee worked as a photographer for the Greenville Daily Reflector newspaper.
I also worked with a few smaller physical collections: the Pickwick Book Club (ECMC #0567) and the Exum- Contentnea Beagle Kennels Collection (ECMC #1500). I practiced creating new entries in ArchivesSpace software. To complete this task, I followed the ECU Special Collections Archival Processing Manual (2024) to ensure I included the relevant information and kept in line with the required style. The Exum- Contentnea Beagle Kennels Collection was unprocessed when I started, so I got to take a box of papers with no original order and go through the entire process of creating an arrangement based on the contents of the material. A majority of the material consisted of correspondence related to the breeding and selling of beagles for rabbit hunting, and a chronological order based on when the letters were written made sense for this collection.
Photo of a letter written to James G. Exum about beagles in January of 1940. Item from Exum – Contentnea Beagle Kennels Collection (#1500), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, USA
My born-digital collection was the WOVV 90.1 FM -What’s Happening on Ocracoke? (ECMC #1488), which consists of copies of a community radio show from Ocracoke Island that is hosted by Peter Vankevich. Composed entirely of digital audio files, this collection posed new challenges that I had not encountered in my previous archival experience. I was introduced to the transcription software Otter AI, which I needed to learn to produce textual representations of the conversations had on the radio show. This was the large project for my internship, and I found it to be a great collection to work with. The diversity of the guests on the radio show and being able to learn new skills in archival processing made for an engaging project that I worked on throughout my internship. The show’s guests ranged from environmentalists, authors, artists, and musicians, all the way to then-North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.