My New Vocabulary

If you hear me say things like calling someone a "good egg" or describe something as being "lovely," please excuse me. It's not my fault, it's all Holly's.

And if I hear something scandalous and I giggle like a little girl, don't blame me; it's Holly's fault.

I officially adore my supervisor in this internship...so much so that I've picked up her mannerisms...all three of us interns have. It's creepy, but in a good way.


So, this internship has definitely made me kinda question my career paths. I've been seriously considering going into archives just because I love playing with really old stuff, but the PA House archives is not as in-depth, and it's a lot more of just simply keeping political stuff safe in case a lawyer needs to figure out legislative intent and so forth. Not very exciting, in my opinion. We've been working on processing some political papers from one of the recently-retired reps for the past few weeks...and even that's not very exciting. It's mostly weeding through crap-tons of form letters that he sent out in response to constituent letters to him. So, mostly it's organizing and preserving a bunch of crap for posterity. I've pretty much gotten pretty disillusioned with the whole archives experience -- kinda agreeing with all the people that respond "that sounds boring" to me when I explain what I've been doing this summer. The oral history research was boring; processing Calendar & Amendment room records was boring; and reps personal papers isn't much better.

All of this disillusionment has kinda changed after today; we went on a "field trip" to the Archives and Special Collections room at Dickinson College...and holy hell have they done so much cool stuff with what they have. First of all, they have some super-cool rare books in their rare books collection -- beautiful bindings, completely awesome stuff. Second, they have Dickinson's personal library that was donated soon after Dickinson was founded in the 1780's. And when I say this collection is awesome, I mean it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a LONG time. It includes books from the 1500's that had been in Dickinson's family for a few generations. The coolest part: they actually let students, faculty, and visiting researchers actually touch those books in the collection that haven't been digitized yet. The archives also has some other cool stuff: fraternity yearbooks from the 70's (think Animal House on speed), House of Commons Debates from during the time of the American Revolution, James Buchanan's papers (he's a Dickinson alum). And they're doing such awesome things with it...a lot of stuff is searchable online...and what's not, at least has a finding aid online. It's an archive that's actually used by researchers. Unless I work in one that is actually used, I think I'll go nuts.