Thursday, April 13, 2017

Current Experiences in the State Historical Society of Missouri

Katie Lewis came to Southeast Missouri State University in the Spring of 2017. Katie was awarded a Graduate Assistantship due to her amazing educational and professional background. In this blog, she tells us a little about her experiences here at SEMO during her first semester. 

In January, I started my Graduate Assistantship at the State Historical Society of Missouri, Research Center. Most days at the research center consist of going through old documents from the Oliver Law Firm; this is an ongoing project that the center has been working since before I started working there. When I go through the documents, I very carefully remove staples, paper clips, and other metal objects from them; by removing the metal from the documents it helps preserve the papers a little longer. Other days in the center, I get to go through old photos that have been donated to the center; most of these photos end up on the State Historical Society's online database. On our busier days, we have people that come in to do research; on these days I normally just copy documents for the researchers. When there is not much to do around the center, I spend my time reading for my classes.
So far everything is going well at the State Historical Society. I'm excited to get to learn more about the history of Missouri by working at the State Historical Society as well as how to properly archive items that we receive in the center. I cannot wait to see what the next two years have in store for me at the State Historical Society of Missouri.