What is the mission of your internship organization/department?
Pandemic Religion: A Digital Archive captures how individuals and religious communities are responding to and handling the current COVID-19 pandemic. The project is preserving history in real time for future generations and future historical research. The collections currently have everything from written personal stories, to social media posts, to photographs, to cell phone videos, to oral histories.
What is your role in the organization/department and how does it support the mission?
Lincoln has broken out this semester’s internship into the following efforts:
- Describing. Bridget and I have been working together to come up with review criteria for the project’s video and audio submissions, as well as to update and add new metadata to existing items. In doing so, we’ve been able to get a feel for the project, understand more fully its mission, and start to brainstorm our final interpretive exhibit, which is the semester’s capstone activity.
- Collecting. We’re still working through how this part of the internship is going to look, but we’ll likely be working with Jessica Mack to coordinate the public outreach component of the semester. I think that the goal is to continue to grow and diversify the collections, working with both existing partners as well as new religious institutions.
- Collaborating. The team is very inclusive and open to all sorts of discussions. Religion and COVID are both highly sensitive, highly personal, and sometimes political topics, so Slack has been a great vehicle for asking those tricky questions and ensuring that I maintain neutrality and professionalism in the updates that I make to the live site.
- Interpreting. I think that the interpretive component goes hand in hand with the collaborating component. Our capstone is to create an interpretative exhibit around one or more themes in the collection and work with CHNM historians to anchor the exhibit to religious theory.
What are you most excited to be doing?
There are three exciting efforts this semester:
- Community outreach. The project has partnered with several religious institutions, so there’s an opportunity to work with these partners and collect, broaden, and diversify the collections. I don’t have any experience in community outreach, but it’s a skill that I’d like to have as I enter the public history job force.
- Grant writing. My professional goals after this program involve getting on with a smaller historical institution and then writing (and hopefully winning!) grants that will fund the expansion of online exhibits. I’m a writer by trade, so I have a pretty solid understanding of professional writing and have dabbled in grant writing, but I’ve always wanted to be a part of a living, breathing grant to understand its lifecycle in an academic/nonprofit environment. The Pandemic Religion project has a few grants that they’re currently working on, so I look forward to being a part of that process.
- Social media. This is another area that’s completely out of my comfort zone, but there’s a lot of room for immersion on this project. Bridget has a lot of experience in social media marketing and outreach, so I’m excited to watch and learn from her. Along with the community outreach component, social media has long been on my list of professional skills to acquire so that I’m more well rounded entering the public history industry.
