Description
The Archivist internship for the Pacific Atrocities Education Center (PAE) was a very rewarding experience. The opportunity was to help kickstart a digital archive for their archives section. The internship was applying Dublin Core Metadata Standards to metadata from collected documents on Japanese War Crimes in the Sino-Japanese War from the National Archives (NARA). The internship was based around a sense of urgency for preservation and accessibility efforts of these documents given their state of fragility, and since most NARA archives had restrictions due to Covid-19. The team worked Omeka which is a free, open-source content management system for online digital collections. This project has contributed to my professional and academic growth through project management, crystalizing DC standards applications, and learning how small organizations run archival projects. There were many challenges and success faced by the interns and the organization. I learned that more resources for small community-based organizations starting digital archives would be beneficial. Those that don’t have the infrastructure to pay archivists, or informational professionals, but have strong missions to share microhistories.