HIS5944 (1/11/21 - 1/15/21)

Hello, my name is Scott Galloway and I am a graduate student at the University of Central Florida. I was given the wonderful opportunity to be an intern at the University of Central Florida’s Library in Special Collections and University Archivists. I received this internship due to my volunteering that I had previously done at the SCUA while I was in undergraduate. From that volunteering service, I was able to understand the importance of archiving and processing a collection. I had processed around four collections that ranged from a box or two to around four or five boxes to process. I’d like to think that I had performed well enough that Mary Rubin and the SCUA wanted me back.

My research interests are still grounded in digital history which aligns with this internship with the COVID-19 Collection. I began on Monday this week to discover the digitization process along with Mary guiding through the steps that it takes to process an interview for public consumption. I would oversee the interviews and reviewing the transcription and captioning process. However, I was still trained to perform these actions if needed. Already, I have performed two interviews with UCF affiliated graduate students to test the process and do it independently from Mary as she is pushing the project for me to lead.

What I hope to gain from this internship is skills tailored towards digital history and preservation. I want to understand how the process works and the potential it has on the field. In addition, the COVID-19 Collection deals with a recent pandemic that the United States has continuously been affected by since early 2020 in the spring semester. Most of society has felt it’s impact in some shape or form and this collection sheds light on how, at the local level, the university’s constituents coped with the sudden change. I have been given a wonderful opportunity to make the most out of a dark time by preserving the memory of COVID-19 and understand how students dealt with a massive pandemic within the twenty-first century.

So far, my plans are to expand the project to incorporate more departments besides the history department at UCF. I began the project with some contributions from the History Department but I want to include more than just one single department. Interviews will begin to incorporate faculty such as professors to understand a perspective that is missing from the collection. It is vital to understand how both the student and the professor copes with dealing with a pandemic. No two students or professors share the same mind and have their own unique ways of handling the solitude of quarantine. My hope is that future research can be done by using the University’s COVID-19 collection to explore the effects of a pandemic within Orlando or anything of that nature. It is still a wonderful opportunity to historicize this event and has always been an interest of mine. This interest has always been to “make” and “record” history in the best way possible.