Madeleine Mendell, Weeksville Heritage Center, Spring 2020, RDLGF
My Spring 2020 internship at Weeksville Heritage Center was done in conjunction with a Regional Media Legacies grant from the Gardiner Foundation. At Weeksville, I helped to manage their collections of audiovisual materials, mainly oral histories that have been collected or created by the museum over the years. These important oral histories have preserved the legacy of this historic free Black neighborhood, which has existed since the 1830s, as well as the changing demographics over the past 100 years and lived experiences of its residents. These oral histories also help preserve the legacy of culinary, artistic, and musical heritage of the neighborhood. I helped inspect over 200 items, mainly optical media, in an effort to reconcile their digital and physical storage and to plan a workflow for the production and archival sides of the institution moving forward.