Hello there!
Today was officially my first day of my internships! Now, first of all, I am so excited for this semester. I love to learn new information and skills and the wealth of knowledge that is contained at the library and National Music Museum (NMM) will certainly provide me an array of opportunities this semester.
Today at the I.D. Weeks Library I was introduced to the archives and shown around the special collections before being turned over to the South Dakota Oral History Center director for the next 5 weeks.
For those of you who are not familiar with what oral history is there are a lot of really excellent resources that you can peruse for your edification but The Oral History Association has an excellent definition that I will leave a link to as well as a link from their site that talks about doing good oral histories.
http://www.oralhistory.org/about/do-oral-history/
http://www.oralhistory.org/web-guides-to-doing-oral-history/
I will have more updates regarding my adventures at the Oral History Center as the weeks progress.
In addition to my introduction at the library I had a few hours of my NMM internship today as well. A significant portion of my hours will be working on a huge project the entire community of NMM people are working on (I will talk about that in a different post)
In short though, today I helped place instruments in a light box so that the museum had good quality images for the website. As a person who barely uses a point and shoot camera let alone those HUGE fancy cameras that do some incredible technological magic.
I learned how photo light boxes work (kind of) and placed many saxophones into said light box to be photographed. This required me to crawl under a sheet between takes (each instrument gets 3 pictures, but I will show you that next week) to re-position the instrument. I didn't realize that I would be doing this sort of work today so instead of wearing shorts or pants I was wearing my favorite yellow skirt because I had wanted to look nice for my first day at both of my internships. I made it work as I half crawled/crouched under the sheets of the light box. I did not drop or break any instruments- although a metal base clarinet tried to escape after I had placed it on its little stand. Thank goodness for fishing line! I will make sure that next week I will be in work type clothing and I do promise that I will link a video of what the entire process looks like because it is really neat!
Until next time friends,
-Kylie
Today was officially my first day of my internships! Now, first of all, I am so excited for this semester. I love to learn new information and skills and the wealth of knowledge that is contained at the library and National Music Museum (NMM) will certainly provide me an array of opportunities this semester.
Today at the I.D. Weeks Library I was introduced to the archives and shown around the special collections before being turned over to the South Dakota Oral History Center director for the next 5 weeks.
For those of you who are not familiar with what oral history is there are a lot of really excellent resources that you can peruse for your edification but The Oral History Association has an excellent definition that I will leave a link to as well as a link from their site that talks about doing good oral histories.
http://www.oralhistory.org/about/do-oral-history/
http://www.oralhistory.org/web-guides-to-doing-oral-history/
I will have more updates regarding my adventures at the Oral History Center as the weeks progress.
In addition to my introduction at the library I had a few hours of my NMM internship today as well. A significant portion of my hours will be working on a huge project the entire community of NMM people are working on (I will talk about that in a different post)
In short though, today I helped place instruments in a light box so that the museum had good quality images for the website. As a person who barely uses a point and shoot camera let alone those HUGE fancy cameras that do some incredible technological magic.
I learned how photo light boxes work (kind of) and placed many saxophones into said light box to be photographed. This required me to crawl under a sheet between takes (each instrument gets 3 pictures, but I will show you that next week) to re-position the instrument. I didn't realize that I would be doing this sort of work today so instead of wearing shorts or pants I was wearing my favorite yellow skirt because I had wanted to look nice for my first day at both of my internships. I made it work as I half crawled/crouched under the sheets of the light box. I did not drop or break any instruments- although a metal base clarinet tried to escape after I had placed it on its little stand. Thank goodness for fishing line! I will make sure that next week I will be in work type clothing and I do promise that I will link a video of what the entire process looks like because it is really neat!
Until next time friends,
-Kylie
