Archives & Special Collections highly values its interns and volunteers and welcomes interested persons to join our team to bring our collections to the research community.
A voluntary internship provides hands-on experience designed to complement a student’s formal academic training. Although internships are unpaid, they can be completed for academic credit depending upon the student’s school’s policy.
We partner with departments and units on campus in providing internship opportunities for UConn students. We also partner with regional library and information studies programs for on-site training in archival methods for graduate level students.
Internships are managed by the archivists or other appropriate staff with applicable expertise. We endeavor to match an applicant’s interests or field of study with an appropriate collection or archival project.
Some options for internship and volunteer topics include:
- Processing archival collections, including working in our collections management system, ArchivesSpace, to create finding aids
- Preparing collections for digitization and ingesting digital files into the digital repository in the Connecticut Digital Archive (https://ctdigitalarchive.org/)
- Planning, researching and implementing exhibits using the archival collections and published resources
- Planning teaching units, document analysis sessions, and other creative and instructional uses of the collections
- Writing about the collections for our social media, to highlight or advertise the collections to researchers
- Implementing basic preservation of documents and other formats, which may involve working with the UConn Library Conservator.
Unless the project will be accomplished remotely the work can only be done during the hours our reference desk is open: Mondays through Fridays, 9a.m. to 4p.m.
Eligibility for internships requires that you be:
- currently enrolled, or accepted for enrollment at an accredited educational institution
- in good academic standing and your qualifications and interests should match the requirements of the internship project
We ask that interns make a regular commitment in terms of scheduling, reliability and dedication to whatever project they are tasked with working on. Unless you have a particular expertise in an area of the work, we will place you on a project that we feel has the most need.
All interns and volunteers must fill out the appropriate paperwork, which will involve giving your social security number, to allow access in the various systems we use to manage and make our collections accessible. Interns and volunteers are required to follow our basic rules of confidentiality involving our collections, donors and researchers.
As a first step we recommend applicants contact us at archives@uconn.edu to talk about your interests, focus of study, and other options.