Intern Project Description
PROJECT TITLE: Digitizing Interviews about the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Collection
Supervisor / Title:
Natalie Sinclair / Rights & Reproduction Coordinator
Brief description of internship project:
The intern will complete the second half of an audio digitization project focused on Black and labor history in Chicago and the United States. The project concerns a collection of oral history interviews conducted by labor activist Greg LeRoy with members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The intern will digitize, catalog, and transcribe audiocassettes containing conversations on race relations, unions, lived experience of the Great Migration, and the history of rail travel held with early union members and organizers.
Project Duties / Tasks & Corresponding Educational Goals
Duty / Task
Corresponding Educational Goal
Digitized audiocassettes using Audacity software
Intern will learn how to examine tapes and clean digitization equipment, how to use Audacity software to adjust quality, create mp3 and WAVE files from captured audio.
Catalog tapes according to local cataloging guidelines
Intern will learn how to follow a cataloging styleguide, implement controlled vocabularies
Use BWF MetaEdit tool to implement federal digital preservation standards
Intern will learn basics of digital preservation metadata, how to use a common GLAM tool for AV metadata.
Transcribe oral history interviews
Intern will practice transcription skills, learn to identify content with potential for high interest.
Qualifications:
Strong Oral & Written Communication
Strong organizational skills and attention to detail.
Interest in digital preservation and/or cataloging
Final Product (if any) Expected at the End of the Internship:
Fully cataloged digital files, updated finding aid and/or ARCHIE record
Season: Summer
Dates of Internship: June 12-August 9
Time commitment: 200 hours over 8 weeks, 25 hours/week
Will the intern be paid? Yes
If so, how will the intern be paid? Through the Archie Motley Archival Internship Program, a program of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium