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Archive Internship
Yosemite National Park
Yosemite National Park was first set aside as a reserve in 1864, the oldest unit established in the National Park Service. In 1890 it was designated as a National Park. Yosemite was a leader in establishing a prototype National Park Service museum program in the early twentieth century, and has developed museum collections in response to a variety of needs and opportunities. The resulting museum collection is one of the finest in the National Park Service, in its size, value, depth and complexity. Its holdings include over 2.4 million natural and cultural items. Photographs of the Yosemite area constitute a large and important part of the park’s collection of historic material. They provide an invaluable documentary record of the landscapes, populations, historic structures, and activities of the park. The museum collection of over 50,000 photographs, albums, photographically-illustrated books, stereographs, negatives, and lantern slides ranges from some of the earliest photographs taken of the park to the work of contemporary visitors and artists. The collection also contains unique and important manuscript materials related to Yosemite’s history, including personal papers of James Mason Hutchings and Galen Clark, park administrative records, early concessionaire records, and numerous hotel registers. The Yosemite Park and Curry Co. donated their own archives of records, photographs, and other documentary material to the park’s collection. Additional paper materials include historic brochures and maps, chromolithographs and engravings, and other publications related to the history of the park. The archive contains 1,800 cubic feet of material from the 1870s to the present. In addition, the park slide archive contains over 100,000 images. Past interns in the Archives at Yosemite were introduced to the archives field and mentored by the park archivist. Generally, the duties of archives interns have included processing and preserving documents, photos, drawings and film. During the summer of 2007, interns focused on re-organizing and re-housing the park’s central files collection. This re-housing project involved transferring files to new folders and boxes, removing staples and other undesirable materials, and checking files for signs of decay. Interns also catalogued old films which had been recently transferred to digital media. This process involved reviewing newly digitized films, compiling finding aids based on the content of the films, and researching the copyright status of films. A third project this summer was scanning, classifying and re-housing old photographs. During the summer of 2006, interns worked with several collections, which included documents and information relating to many aspects of the Park’s history, including park records on land management and construction; official records on accidents, deaths, personnel and correspondence within the park; ethnographic information on the history of Native Americans in the park and numerous other primary source documents. One project undertaken by the interns involved duplicating and re-housing the collection of Craig Bates, Yosemite’s primary Ethnographer from the early 1970’s until 2002. The Bates collection included approximately sixty boxes of documents, photographs and other genealogical information related to Yosemite’s Native American tribes. Interns also worked with the Frank Latta collection. Latta was a mid-nineteenth century Central Valley school teacher who studied Native American history in California. A third important project undertaken was digitizing Yosemite’s film collection. This project involved transferring old film onto new archival cores in preparation for cleaning and transfer to DVDs. Interns also were introduced to the process of appraisal, which involved evaluating incoming documents and determining which ones should be preserved in Yosemite’s Archives. Dates |