Baltimore Resident Interns at Maryland Archives

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St. Mary’s College of Maryland student Kaiolani Siregar ’14 (far right) with conservator Maria Day and Maryland State Archives Director Ed Papenfuse.

ST. MARY'S CITY, MD (11/17/2011)(readMedia)-- Kaiolani Siregar, a student at St. Mary's College of Maryland and resident of Baltimore, spent ten weeks this past summer working as an archival intern in the special collections department of the Maryland Archives.

"I was working with the Lois Green Carr collection," said Siregar. Carr, a former historian at the archives who studied the history of the colonial Chesapeake region, left behind all the materials in her office when she retired. "It was fun seeing the article my adviser had written, but that [Carr] had gone through and made her little notes on," said Siregar.

Siregar, an anthropology major, applied for the archives internship after the College's Career Development Center sent out an application form. Siregar was looking for career opportunities in anthropology and thought the job sounded interesting. While going through Carr's collection, she found Maryland maps, including maps of St. Mary's City, and personal sketches.

Siregar's favorite part of her internship was using the Archives' conservation lab to make sure the documents she found were properly preserved. In the conservation lab, which has windows so that visitors to the Archives can watch the process, there are two rooms with big tables for laying out work. "We had to use weights to flatten [the maps] out because they had been rolled up for so long, and we had to be careful because they were brittle," said Siregar. To store the maps, Siregar rolled them up and wrapped Tyvek, an acid-free material, around them "like a big candy wrapper." Afterwards, she put each map in a custom-made box and entered a number and a description into the database.

Back at St. Mary's, Siregar is continuing to work in anthropology. She spends ten hours a week at the Historic St. Mary's City Archaeology lab doing cataloguing and database work. She will be working at the Archives again over winter break and hopes to get another internship in conservation at some point in the future.

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St. Mary's College of Maryland, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best public liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. More than 2,000 students attend the college, nestled on the St. Mary's River in Southern Maryland.