Archives Intern Spotlight: Rose Roberson

Q: What was a day in the life like as an intern in the Library & Archives?

Throughout my time as an intern, I had a few different projects that I was working on at different times. Most days I would come in and either do a little reshelving of CDs and LPs in the music library or start working on processing the Donald Pippin archival collection.  To process the Donald Pippin archival collection, I went through a few different stages. The processing archivist, Elisabeth Hedges and I, started by getting a count of the total number of boxes in the collection. Once we had a total box count, we started to go through the boxes, creating an inventory of the items and documents that were in them, labeling folders, and transferring them into acid free folders to aid in organization and preservation. After the inventory was finished, I rearranged the collection by dividing it into series and sub series based on related functions. On days that I didn’t work on processing the collection, I worked on digitizing parts of the Irwin Kostal collection so that it can eventually be accessible on the internet. 

Q: What was your favorite collection that you discovered in the process and why?

One of my favorite collections that I got the opportunity to work on was the Irwin Kostal collection. Kostal did a lot of orchestration work with movies such as West Side Story and Mary Poppins as well as TV shows like The Garry Moore show. Because he was involved in different areas of the music industry, there are multiple types of ephemera that are in his collection, like Oscar tickets and Emmy news clippings. He also saved a lot of the telegrams that he received on opening nights, which are fun to read through and see how people responded to his work.

Q: What are you working on/studying as part of your program at IU- Indy? What skills have you picked up from your internship?

Right now, I’m working on courses in book history and archival research. These are both essential classes for my degree, which is a Master of Library Science with a specialization in Archival Management. I enjoy learning about the changes that have occurred in how books are created, published and distributed in book history. Archival research gives me the opportunity to get to know the archives from the perspective of the researcher instead of the archivist. A lot of classes in my major discuss the theory related to the field of archives but don’t necessarily cover the practical application of the day to day, so it has been helpful to learn more of these skills at the internship. I’ve learned how to digitize newspapers and photographs, reshelve records and CDs, and inventory collections, to name a few skills!

Q: Where are you headed after your internship? What projects are you working on and excited about?

I’ll be finishing up my last semester following my internship so I still have a little time left at IU Indianapolis. After that, I will be starting the job hunt, looking to find a position with an archives. But for now, a project that I am excited about is some research that I am doing on the Indianapolis publishing company, Bobbs-Merrill and Indiana authors.