Aparna Subramanian, Cooper Hewitt Museum, Fall 2020
My Fall 2020 internship at the Cooper Hewitt Museum started late in September due to organizational processing from the Smithsonian end. The internship required a SI login to access their digital files on cloud services and communicate over email within the Smithsonian email domain. The Smithsonian took these measures for Information Security purposes as it relates to data integrity.
Through the internship, I have learned that policy building combines organization choices, technical requirements, team-work, and it’s a constant work-in-progress. As an intern, it was challenging to decide on selection/ appraisal for an institution like the Smithsonian. I created archival workflow policies that required working together with the production team and the museum registrar and understanding current practices in the museum related to DAMS. With the live production files being in the cloud, I always feared messing with the production files while browsing them to create an inventory.
DAMS is a system that helps to store and retrieve files, but there is much work that goes before a file needs are ready for DAMS. As a site, the Cooper Hewitt Museum has excessive work for an archivist, including processing the archival workspace processes for the production files generated since 2017 and previous backlogs, which are in different hard drives, that do not have a unique ID. Remote work does not help in digital workflows that involve heavy downloads of 2TB of data or more; it can choke up the internet bandwidth unless it is a dedicated fiber-optic line. The archivist and archival processing role at the museum are more suitable to do in-person than telework, and I hope the museum can recruit someone full-time.
Aparna Subramanian interned at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in Fall 2020.
