William Plotnick, Universal Hip Hop Museum
My Summer 2022 internship at the Universal Hip Hop Museum provided me with the perfect balance of remote and in-person experience and helped strengthen my skills in relation to both digital and physical objects. Throughout the course of the summer, I was presented with large digital collections held by the museum of various media objects (from audio tapes to DVDs to clothing to musical instruments) and was able to collaborate with museum staff to come up with a plan for how to properly catalog these items. Once the necessary metadata fields were decided, I had the opportunity to work through these collections and discover the challenges (such as conducting timely and practical research) and successes (capturing the metadata fields for multiple major museum collections) related to recording relevant and useful metadata for future users. In addition to this, I was responsible for managing, ingesting content into, and understanding post-ingest problems (such as why certain items had missing metadata) with the DAM system, Terentia.
