Center for Puerto Rican Studies
My internship at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College took place between February to April 2023. Founded in 1973, Centro is the largest repository dedicated to the Puerto Rican experience in the United States and is fully open to the public. Their founding mission has always centered on access, removing oppression from education, and bringing the Puerto Rican community into the university. My time was spent conducting item level inventories of several of their collections including the Centro Records Collection, the Victor Fragoso Fernández Collection, the Ibrahim González Collection, and the Pedro Pietri Collection.
Working with these varied collections I gained experience handling and assessing over 20 different audiovisual formats. As Centro has no AV specialist on staff, the goal of my internship was to leave behind an easily understandable inventory template to be used by staff. This meant creating a controlled glossary of format terms, providing resources for format identification and risks, and creating comprehensive metadata fields.