With all that is going on in the world right now, many of our summers have not turned out the way we originally planned. Usually, in the summer between 1st and 2nd year, MMSt students embark on an internship within a cultural heritage organization in order to gain hands on experience within their chosen environment. This year, with the restrictions in place, many opportunities were placed on hold or eliminated completely. However, a few of my fellow classmates were fortunate enough to find internships to complete this summer in different aspects of the cultural sector. I recently sat down with two students from the 2021 cohort, Jessica and Alynese, to talk about their internships and how COVID-19 has impacted the internship experience for them.
Jessica Lanziner is currently doing her internship remotely as the Research Fellow at the Museum of Health Care. Knowing nothing about healthcare, she applied on a whim after LinkdIn creeping someone from her undergraduate degree, who she noticed had the position before.
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| Workplace set-up. Photo courtesy of Jessica Lanzier |
Jessica: I noticed it said you don’t need to know anything about healthcare – I know nothing, but the internship was still going forward and it’s a stipend pay so I applied and got a call back which was awesome. It's not what I was planning, but it’s a huge research role, and I am learning a lot that I never thought I would be learning about. I had to apply to the fellowship with a topic, propose a research idea, and I figured let’s be timely and connect it to the current COVID-19 pandemic. I selected the history of PPE and Infectious diseases in Canada, looking at PPE and how it has evolved. Since I knew that museums would not be opening I proposed to do things entirely remotely.
AM: Where did you gain inspiration for your research topic?
Jessica’s current manuscript, titled after some reworking, is called “Histories of Personal Protective Equipment and Strategies in the Fight to Control Infectious Disease,” which once completed will be available on the Museum of Healthcare Website (where you can also see past Research Fellow Manuscripts). As a research fellow, Jessica is required to write a large paper at the end of her fellowship and create 4 blog posts about aspects of her research.
AM: What is your paper about?
Jessica: The history of different PPE and how it has evolved. The last chapter is on infectious disease outbreaks and how we have managed them in Canada using the history of PPE from before. My manuscript will look at Canadian responses to the 1918 influence, HIV, Tuberculosis, Sars, COVID-19. It's weird that I am currently living my research. For COVID-19, no archival materials are available so it’s all my own pictures and such.
AM: What have you found challenging about this experience?
Jessica: It’s been hard because I eat sleep and breathe pandemic. It's good and I have learned a lot but it makes me frustrated in my daily life. Stuff we have known to be science since the 1880s is not new or difficult! Because in their galleries they currently have vaccines and infectious disease information so it will be interesting to see how they will incorporate the stuff from this year.
AM: What interesting facts have you learned?
Jessica: [about] Respirators and disposable respirators. In the past, they had a similar issue to today with people being like my child is afraid of wearing masks, kids very afraid of gas masks so [the government] decided to make child friendly gas masks modelled off of Mickey mouse, that has ears and polka dots, and it makes them even more scary. They didn’t end up using them, there are still some in military archives, so they are hard to find but even more scary than a regular gas mask.
AM: Have you encountered any difficulties in your research?
Jessica: I have been conscious in trying to talk about how epidemics affect different racial groups in Canada, but I am only finding limited resources online. Papers just aren’t available for research online, it's hard to find diverse viewpoints about how historically pandemics affected minority communities in Canada. It's been frustrating, but that’s how it is with doing online research right now. Since I can’t go into the archives I have to rely on just what I can find online.
AM: Any advice for future people in your role?
Jessica: Not advice, but we all need to give more credit to those students who have spent their time doing those boring hours on long digitization projects, the only thing online saving us right now! Manual labour from cataloging students is really paying off for me right now.
AM: What skills have you employed from classwork?
Jessica: In our indigenous material heritage course, we looked at questions of who created this heritage and what does it mean for people to be using it who are from a different culture? I have been trying to follow the things from there and use broader viewpoints within my research.
AM: Anything surprising in what you have learned?
Jessica: I am learning a lot about copyright! I have had to deal with copyright and infringement, and that made me realize I wasn’t always doing it right before. I have learned how to actually get rights for images and reproduction rights, I’ve had to email a ton of places for certain images and I have become attached to having certain images! Some places like the city of Toronto allow you to use them for free for research if they’re online. I have been very attached to getting the correct photo rights!
Alynese Nightingale is interning at Lambton House Museum as an Archives Technician.
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| Lantern Slide/Glass negative from Lambton House Museum. Photo courtesy of Alynese Nightingale |
AM: Tell me about your internship position.
Alynese: I applied in late April and didn’t hear back until June. I’m an Archive Technician – they merged two positions. I am by myself everyday, go in to do what I need to do, no one bothers me or anything. They usually hire two interns but only one this year —due to COVID-19 they have combined the positions. Since I am working alone I get to go into the office everyday. I am very lucky that the pandemic has not affected the daily roles of my job.
AM: What a day in the life looks like for you?
Alynese: I am organizing collections so I like to start by going back and double checking my work from the pervious day for any mistakes. I don’t have concrete things I need to do everyday, I have creative control so I can choose what to work on. Today I finished cleaning out the archive room and started organizing collections which I will spend the next few weeks doing. I am helping the Lambton House Museum create a foundation for their archives, putting collection management policies in place, making finding aids so that museum workers can access things and researchers can come in. Doing that and getting it into an online database so it's all catalogued, they currently do not have accession numbers, so I'm creating a system for them that works and is easy for researchers and museum staff to navigate. I have been applying a lot of what I’ve learned in collections management from this past year.
I have always wanted to do collections so I was very excited for the opportunity when they were like “here are all of our collection things, do something with it!” In smaller museums sometimes collections are neglected for other more important things, and now I have time to focus on this and get it organized.
At the end of the week I do a report on what I did that week. I like the work because I can listen to music and podcasts! I listened to a lot of Dateline but it started to get too heavy so switched to Things You Missed in History Class.
AM: What is your favourite aspect of the job so far?
Alynese: Accessioning, going through and doing inventory reports, itemizing. I like seeing a new historical thing for the first time, it’s exciting to be the first person to see it.
AM: Is there anything that has surprised you about the job?
Alynese: I am surprised by how much control they have given me and how much they respect my opinion, not treating me like a student – they are treating me like an expert in the field and they are confident in the schooling and experience I have to do the job.
AM: What are you most excited to accomplish?
Alynese: I am most excited to accomplish organizing the collection. I am excited to create a concrete policy they can follow in the future, and have an impact on the organization and to be able to contribute a legacy to the future.
AM: What are some of the interesting objects you have found in the collection so far?
Alynese: Lots of photographs of the Humber River area and lots of cool photography glass negatives from the Kodak Archives showcasing the Humber River area, very cool. They have around 400 glass negatives or lantern slides showcasing very cool historic photos or paintings from the early 1900s. They are film negatives that layer onto a piece of glass and encased and can slide into a projector. They cover scenes of the Humber River, paintings, children’s drawings on a project for pollution, houses in the area that students went and took pictures of, lots of different areas of local history that they have recorded.
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AM: Any advice for future people in your position?
Alynese: Keep a lot of notes and be really organized because it is easy to get confused! I have had plenty of times where I work on something and get disorganized and have to start over, so I have learned the importance of detailed notes!
The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
