Shift #11 (3.75 hrs) - Weekly Check-in Email, Collections/Blog Post Research & Topic Approval Meeting

Shift #11 - Weekly Check-in Email, Collections/Blog Post Research & Topic Approval Meeting

Monday, June 3, 2024 | 6:15-10 am CST/7:15-11 am EST (3.75 hrs)

Details

Michelle Hurt, student/intern

Jennifer Gonzalez, practicum supervisor

I am back in town from my travels and doing work to catch up, as I wasn't able to do much work last week from being in Seattle. Today I worked on my delayed weekly check-in email to Jennifer (we had to submit our hours for May and tell her about the recorded webinar we watched). In addition, I continued my research into the Law Library's collections as well as formulate my ideas for the blog post assignment. I started by looking at the Spanish Legal Documents collection (items between the 15th and 19th centuries). As I viewed each image, I saw that these were all in Spanish; for some reason, I thought there would be translations. Because I cannot read Spanish, I had to vacate this notion of coming up with an idea from the legal documents of Spain. I did wonder, why did the U.S. government purchase or acquire this collection, and to what end? 

Since I was stuck, I pivoted to another collection in the Law Library, the Piracy Trials. I've never been a big fan of pirates (but I don't dislike them) so I wasn't sure what I would find here or if anything would be of interest to me. I did remember a comment my 5-year-old son made the other day about how he thought Darth Vader was a pirate (he is just getting interested in Star Wars) and it made me laugh; maybe he's a space pirate! I viewed the collection and saw that it only had 57 items, which is not very much considering other collections had thousands of documents. Some of the items were diaries or confessions of pirates before they were executed, a few were in different languages, and others were accounts of piracy trials. There was one particular document that caught my eye due to its title - "Criminal Calendar, or, An Awful warning to the youth of America: being an account of the most notorious pirates, highwaymen and other malefactors who have figured in this hemisphere". What I liked about this was its obvious purpose - that readers who may stumble upon it would read its contents and be convinced not to go the way of the pirate life. I added this to my list of topic ideas to bring up to Jennifer at our meeting.

Later in my shift, I met with Jennifer for our topic approval meeting. 

This is a screenshot from our meeting this morning. Jennifer met with every person in our intern cohort to discuss topic ideas, to provide guidance, and to deem a topic approved (or not).

Though my research into the collections has been a bit all over the place, I was ready to talk to Jennifer about my topic ideas. I told her I had one idea I was getting excited about (writing about pirates) and food trucks and youth citizenship (two ideas that were hard to find an "in" into the digital collections). We started by talking about what I found among the Piracy Trials collection. I explained where I was coming from, especially how I liked the author's approach to writing his anthology as a warning; perhaps I could write about how crime was sensationalized back then and now. Jennifer really liked my topic idea but steered me away from editorializing. Instead, she thinks I should pick 3-6 pirates from these 4-5 other resources I found. We had fun coming up with these angles - like a pirate profile of sorts! She thinks I could even have a part 1 blog post and a part 2. Suffice it to say, my topic was approved and I can begin outlining my research and writing.