By Havilah Steinman Bakken (Follow us on LinkedIn)
While earning my Master’s in Library and Information Science, I had the opportunity to complete an internship at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Archives. I grew up spending time at the San Diego Zoo parks, but would not have known about the archives had it not been for the tour set up by my school’s student chapter of the American Association of Archivists.
During my internship, I gained skills that I continue to use in my current role as a law librarian today. Research is directly tied to archival work. In my view, this is an opportunity to not only memorialize our history but also gain an understanding of where we are now.
The archives endeavor to recover materials that were not saved initially when they first came into circulation. I have always appreciated ephemera, things that only exist or are used for a short period of time, whether that’s movie tickets, maps, or guidebooks. Now that I have a period of archival work to look back on, I understand how meaningful this work is. I was able to work with a collection of zoo guidebooks that had been digitized as part of the California Revealed project, and write descriptive metadata to enable researchers to find photos of animals at the Zoo over 100 years old, and even learn their names!
This endeavor took painstaking work of pouring over each page and transcribing the material into the database. Now, it’s a full collection for the public to enjoy. I encounter similar work now as a law librarian at a large firm. Knowledge management is a focus of our team, because each project is a capsule of information that is worth archiving and referring back to. Similar to the metadata I wrote to catalog the antiquated zoo guidebooks, I now use a set library of subject and project tags to organize each of my projects in an internal database. This allows my team members to always have the ability to go back and review each project and learn from what each of us did.
Another cool project I got to be part of at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Archives was to comb through existing collections and update finding aids to allow others to retrace my steps. What is the value of me discovering an initial mockup of one area of the park’s world renown gardens if someone else can’t find it after me to use it in an exhibit? This ability to describe an information discovery pathway is a skill that is very much applicable to my work as a law librarian now. We are constantly writing guides and toolkits to show where to start at the beginning of a big research project and point to options that have gotten us to the material needed.
While I did not end up pursuing archival work, I still view the semester I spent at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Archives as an important aspect of my librarianship training in my master’s program. I do not view it as a deviation, rather an opportunity to step outside of my normal world to experience the joy of learning new things and continue to carry the skills offered with me.
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Notes Between Us (NBU) is a blog about conversations and topics of interest to the writers. The writers are expressing their personal opinions solely. The essays represent their personal beliefs and not those of their workplaces or any organization they are associated with.
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