Category Archives: Student Internships

Yellowstone National Park Archives – Shae Rafferty

My home in the park.
My home in the park.

For my UMSI internship I worked as an intern at the Yellowstone National Park Archives. This was an absolutely amazing experience where I lived, learned, and worked Yellowstone National Park for ten weeks. Yellowstone was amazingly beautiful and so much bigger than I had previously thought. It is an all day trip to drive around the park in its entirety!

 

The Heritage and Research Center
The Heritage and Research Center

I lived in the northern part of the park called Mammoth Hot Springs, but the archive is in Gardiner, a town just outside of the northern entrance of the park. The archives are housed in the Heritage and Research Center (HRC) which also contains the research library, museum collection, and herbarium.

 

My primary duties/projects included processing collections, giving tours to visitors, and working reference. Many of the reference requests involved tracking down relatives who worked in the park over the past 100+ years. Since the Yellowstone Archives is also an affiliate of the National Archives it was very interesting to learn about and use a number of added security measures when providing researchers with records. I was fortunate to work on a number of additional projects though, including creating a work flow for an upcoming digitization project and writing blog posts.

 

Image of Grand Canyon of Yellowstone
Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

 

Bookmobile Day.
Bookmobile Day.

This being an internship at a National Park, my work was not restricted to just indoor activities. The Research Library has a bookmobile deliver books to employees stationed around the park that I drove with the library intern each month, this takes a full 10 hour work day to complete. A number of field trips were also set-up throughout the summer for the HRC employees and interns to visit historical sites and museums about the park’s history.

Image of a moose.
A moose.

Elizabeth M. and P.T. Reilly Intern – Cinda Nofziger

Image of Cinda, her husband, and son bike riding.
All smiles, as we prepare to start our journey, 2014. Photo courtesy of Cinda Nofziger.

I’m excited to be the Reilly Intern at the Cline Library. My family and I arrived in Flagstaff a week ago after bicycling from Ann Arbor, Michigan–where I’m a Masters student at the School of Information–to Colorado. We drove the rest of the way.

This week, I’ve begun planning Special Collections and Archives’ 2014 exhibit showcasing John Running, freelance photographer from Flagstaff. To get inspired for the exhibit design, I’ve been listening to John Running’s oral history interview with Jonathan Pringle and Jess Vogelsang. Running has had an amazing life; for over forty years, he’s traveled and photographed around the Southwest, the United States and internationally, in Trinidad, Palestine, Mexico and Scotland. I’m eager to delve into representing his life and work in the exhibit. As a photographer of people, Running believes making a portrait is a gift; as a documentarian, he believes one must “try to photograph the truth and present it honestly.” He approaches his subjects with humility, grace, and kindness, which come through in his images.  I was pleased to meet him in person and found him to be just as kind and gracious in person. He’s also a great story-teller. I will work to infuse his approach to photography into this exhibit.

I’m really honored to be here working on this project and am thrilled to be in Flagstaff. I look forward to exploring the city and surroundings, as well as learning more about Running’s life, career, and photographs.

I’ve only had time to scratch the surface of his collection, but here are a few of my favorites so far…

Image of a man on a bus
Man on bus, Palenstine. Photo courtesy of the John Running Collection (NAU.PH.2013.4.1.22.23.244).

 

Image of Salina Bartunek in the Grand Canyon Cafe
Salina Bartunek in the Grand Canyon Cafe, Flagstaff, AZ, 1994. Photo courtesy of the John Running Collection (NAU.PH.2013.4.1.13.5.67).