Our Fall Intern Sean recently completed his internship at MAB. Today, Sean reflects on his project – working with and improving access to digital surrogates of collection materials. Sean also elaborates on archival theory vs. hands-on experience. Thank you Sean for all your hard work!

My name is Sean Blocher McTigue and I’ve been an intern at the Moravian Archives for the past several months.

My work has involved assisting with the digitization process for various church registers across multiple congregations. Quality control, file renaming, and metadata embedding were my core responsibilities to help prepare the digitized files for increased discoverability. The screenshot presented here is an image of the software I worked with called Adobe Bridge. This software allowed for careful examination of the images to compare against the physical register we were digitizing as well as embedding metadata directly into the file data itself to ensure the discoverability follows the file. Bridge allowed me to perform all the majority of my duties from one piece of software, minimizing the downtime caused by swapping between programs. Determining which terms to use in the metadata for discoverability involved additional research using materials found online and with the Moravian Archive collections, which was then further curated to outline what was important to the registers.

I learned a lot over the course of the internship. My coursework has provided a very rigid description of how things should be, but I’ve come to see how the reality of archival work requires more flexibility. Very little of what I’ve encountered could be considered textbook, so I’ve had to adapt what I’ve learned to better fit the conditions and tools I was working with. For example, controlled vocabulary was generally taught from the perspective of existing controlled vocabulary structures, such as LCSH or Getty, but the controlled vocabulary I’ve worked on doesn’t fall into either category directly. I’ve used them as references, but have been constructing a local vocabulary based on existing standards, but not directly in line with those standards. Local vocabularies were not discussed much during my classes, save for being told they do exist, so I’ve had to lean on the broader strokes of what I’ve learned to create the basis of a local controlled vocabulary to create a functional system that works now while being translatable to any future systems the archives wishes to implement.

Additionally, I’ve learned that archival work is as much an art as it is a science at times. The quality control process involves making judgement calls on when deeming something needs to be redone. Receiving a new scan does not always mean it will be better than the first one. High quality scans cannot necessarily improve a physical item in poor condition. Tears, worn ink or faded pencil, these issues will still be present in the scan and readability will not be improved without engaging with some level of image processing, a method well avoided as it creates images that do not reflect the actual item itself and maintaining authenticity across physical and digitized items is paramount. This internship augmented my learning from previous volunteer work and my education. I look forward to volunteering at the archives after the completion of my internship.