by Sara Guerrero
This post is from our 2022 Spring Internship series.
My internship in the Communications Department at St. Mary’s University was a memorable experience that helped me gain hands-on experience in digital archiving. The Communications Department focuses on news and information related to the university. They publish the Gold & Blue Magazine and the Gold & Blue Law Edition which tell the unique stories of the university community. They also play a big role in media relations efforts to ensure that the university community is informed about the progress happening within the university.
I specifically worked with the Gold & Blue Magazine and my role was to create a digital archive for the magazine. This project was in pending since 2018 and I had the honor to make this digital repository come to life. The different tasks I had consisted of scanning the magazines from 1985 to 2002, editing the scans, and uploading the scans I created, and the ones already saved into Digital Commons. This project aligned with my future goals of going to graduate school and having a career in Archiving. The skills I was able to gain were learning new software, for instance, I used BePress, which runs Digital Commons, and how to input metadata for the magazines. I used Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop to edit scans throughout the scanning process. Of course, I had various challenges in each task, but the help, I received within the department and from my professor made me feel confident that I was headed in the right direction. Although I worked with a relatively small team, it was great that I could rely on anyone in the office in case I needed assistance with the project. The flexibility of being able to complete my internship in person and at home helped me feel reassured in maintaining my school and life balance.
I am currently still working towards perfecting the Gold & Blue digital archive before the end of the semester. It’s almost complete, but of course, there are future history projects that could be useful to expand the digital repository for the Gold & Blue, like creating a separate repository for the Gold & Blue Law Edition.
You can check the digital repository I created for Gold & Blue through the following link: Gold & Blue | University Communications
You can check out the Gold & Blue Magazine through this link: Gold & Blue | University Communications
You can check out the Gold & Blue Law Edition through this link: Gold & Blue Law Edition Magazine
