Summer in the Archives, Digitally
While most of the class of 2017 has long since departed the campus to embark on their futures, four recent Amherst College graduates spent much of the summer deeply exploring the past of their alma mater.
At the end of July, participants in Frost Library’s Digital Scholarship Summer Internship launched an interactive website on “Early Amherst,” the fruit of weeks of research in the College’s Archives and Special Collections.
Now in its fourth year, the internship program—operated through the library’s digital programs department—assigns participating undergraduates or recent graduates a general project, and the interns delve into the archives, each according to their interests.
Interns work with librarians, archivists and IT specialists, learning research methods and skills related to digitization, curation, information visualization and project management, often with no prior technical or digital scholarship experience.