The Cayuga Museum of Art & History and Seymour Library in Auburn have announced an open internship for the second year of their “Voices of Cayuga County” oral history collecting project. The museum and library explained that the project’s main focus is to seek out stories of traditionally underrepresented communities in their collections. 

These underrepresented communities may include, but are not limited to, African American, Latinx, LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities. The hope is that through this project, the community will become more engaged with their personal connection to and their role in history. 

Geoffrey Starks, the director of development and outreach at the Cayuga Museum, and Dori Gottschalk-Fielding, the coordinator of the Seymour library’s history discovery center, will be the supervisors of this internship.

“The primary purpose of the internship will involve developing the skills and best practices of oral history, interviewing, transcript preparation, and archival preservation and access while helping to continue this oral history collecting initiative for Auburn and Cayuga County,” Starks said.

Tasks the intern will do for this internship include contacting and setting up online interviews with members of the community, drafting interview abstracts and topics lists, successfully recording and carrying out video interviews, transferring, editing and converting interview video files, and transcribing the interviews. 

“We are looking for an applicant with strong time management skills coming from a history, public history, museum studies or library sciences background,” Starks said. “The ideal applicant will have experience with collecting oral histories or be familiar with interviewing and a basic understanding of recording videos, generating transcripts and editing both.”

Starks said that experience working with diverse communities is ideal for a potential candidate. 

Starks also explained that this will be a single internship for one intern. The intern will work for about 8 weeks, 15 hours per week, from June to July. In total, the intern will work 120 hours, and be paid $16 an hour.

“The intern will receive training in oral history interviewing, and coordinate, plan and complete at least ten 30-40 minute interviews,” Starks said. “The intern will work remotely or from the Cayuga Museum, depending on the COVID-19 situation during the summer.”

Applications will be accepted up until Friday, Feb. 26 at 5 p.m. To apply, send a cover letter and resume plus two references and a one-page writing sample to Dori Gottschalk-Fielding at dgfielding@seymourlib.org. 

There is more information about the internship available at Cayuga Museum’s website as well as at the Seymour Library’s website. Starks can also be contacted at geoffrey@cayugamuseum.org for any further questions. 

Editor’s note: This position is supported by a grant from the South Central Regional Library Council (SCRLC). SCRLC’s Technology and Digitization Grants are funded as part of the Regional Bibliographic Data Bases and Interlibrary Resources Sharing (RBDB) Program.  The South Central Regional Library Council is one of nine library councils comprising the Empire State Library Network (ESLN).  As a multi-type library consortium, SCRLC reaches over 500 libraries in its service area.  For more information about SCRLC, visit www.scrlc.org.

Photo provided by Geoffrey Starks