In Internships

Interns in Yellowstone’s museum program worked at Yellowstone’s new Heritage and Research Center (HRC), located near the north entrance to the park, adjacent to Gardiner, Montana. The HRC is an impressive, state-of-the-art collections storage and research facility which contains over 5.3 million items related to the long and rich history of Yellowstone National Park. The primary duty of the interns was original cataloging of items from the museum collections, such as historic postcards, photographs, early souvenirs, natural history specimens and artwork. Original cataloging involves identifying an object, researching it to give it historical context, dating it, entering the information into the National Park Service’s collections database software, and photographing the object. Once catalogued, items can be located by future researchers based on the descriptions and other information supplied by the interns. In addition to cataloguing museum items, interns were asked to design and install museum exhibits with items from the collections. Exhibited items were to be thematically linked and presented historiographically to create a narrative for the viewer. Aesthetic considerations were important in creating these exhibits, and interns were given the opportunity to create labels, install shelves and make other modifications to the display cases to showcase the items according to their own designs. During these internships, interns acted as integral parts of the park’s curatorial staff, and had the opportunity to learn about Yellowstone’s operations and mission by performing collections management functions at museums in the park’s interior and by meeting with other branch staff, such as the park historian, archivist, librarians, anthropologist, historic architect and archeologist.

Dates This internship was offered in Summers 2007, 2006 and 2005.