Indiana State Library: Internship

During the summer of 2018 I completed an internship at the Indiana State Library. I worked as a digitization assistant in the Indiana Division, digitizing maps, atlases, law books, trade catalogs, pamphlets, World War I county histories and items related to the Colonization Movement in Indiana, which was also the subject of a blog post I authored. In April of 2019, I attended the IUPUI Capstone event, where I discussed the internship with fellow students and faculty. I created the poster below to summarize my experiences and achievements.

Capstone

The Indiana State Library

“The Indiana State Library was established in 1825 to provide library services to Indiana’s state governmental officials and employees. Since that time, its responsibilities have expanded to provide services to all citizens of Indiana, including special populations such as the blind and visually impaired. Additionally, the State Library collects and preserves all types of information about the state of Indiana, supports the development of the library profession, and strengthens services of all Indiana libraries.

Today, the Indiana State Library houses vast collections with over two million volumes and three million manuscripts, as well as thousands of maps, federal documents, microfilm, and more. Just as the Library of Congress serves as the historical repository for our nation, the State Library is responsible for collecting and preserving all types of information and data about Indiana. The State Library also houses two of the largest Indiana History and Genealogy collections in the nation.” – Indiana State Library Facebook

The Internship

As a digitization assistant working in the Indiana Division at the Indiana State Library, I digitized materials in the collection selected by my supervisor Chris Marshall. I also curated materials, such as selected pamphlets in the pamphlet collection, by evaluating the condition of the titles and comparing them to recently acquired copies of the same title, and making a decision to replace, or add the new item. I also located requested titles from the vault and transported them to the digitization lab, where I scanned them. If items were deemed too fragile for digitization, they were transferred to the Conservation Lab. After scanning, I evaluated the scans for quality control and named them according to the ISL file naming conventions. Tiff files were created for preservation, and JPEGS for the digital library. Photoshop was used to edit images for use on the website. Upon approval from the supervisor, the images were uploaded to ContentDM and metadata was created to aid in the finding process.