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.
Universal Hip Hop Museum
Outside of the online setting, working for the Universal Hip Hop Museum this summer gave me the experience of understanding how an institution begins the process of preserving their archival collection. The Universal Hip Hop Museum is not set to open until 2024, and therefore all their collections are currently being held in a storage facility in Newark, NJ. I had the opportunity to visit the storage facility with staff and begin the process of unboxing collections, discovering what they contained, and coming up with preservation plans for a complex set of items such as magazines, VHS tapes, DVDs, audio tapes, clothing, musical instruments, and personal memorabilia. This process gave me the experience of handling the multiple different types of media objects that we learned about over two years at MIAP.
