Preparing Digital Image and Audio Surrogates for DAMS (Digital Asset Management) Ingest, Migration, and Online Access Internship

Background and Project Description: The Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives (NAA), is offering a paid internship in its Digitization Program during Summer 2015. The NAA operates one of the Smithsonian’s most successful digitization programs, having produced more than one-half million high-resolution images of photographs, artwork, manuscript material and sound recordings from its collections.

Internship Duties: The digitization intern will work under the supervision of the Digital Imaging Specialist and Media Specialist to evaluate and address the backlog of digital surrogates that need preparation for ingest into the Smithsonian’s Digital Asset Management (DAMS) system as well as new digital image and audio surrogates being created. The intern will become familiar with Embedded Megadata guidelines for Digital Images (Dublin Core, EmDAWG, IPTC) and learn the differences between existing guidelines. The intern will then learn technique for embedding minimal descriptive embedded metadata into digital surrogates and establish relationships between digital surrogates and metadata within the Collection Information System (CIC). The intern will create online access to collections through XML export. Finally, the intern will also prepare digital sound files for ingest into the Smithsonian’s DAMS system.

Learning Objectives: The intern will learn appropriate techniques and tools for embedding metadata and generating checksums for sound files, and creating basic descriptive metadata. After ingest into DAMS, the intern will use established criteria for quality control of ingested items. By the end of the internship the intern will have gained an understanding of the basics of processing and preserving analog sound materials, as well as the basics of digital asset management.

Intern Qualifications: Graduate students, recent graduates, or college/university students within 6 months of their graduation date in archives, library science or museum studies programs who are interested in digital technologies as applied to archival care and management of historical collections.

Application Deadline: March 1, 2015

Stipend: $3,000

Timeline: Start Date is May 18, 2015. The internship lasts for 10 weeks, 4 days a week.

To apply: Please submit a cover letter describing your qualifications and interests, resume and contact information for three references to Jeanine Nault at naultj@si.edu

Location: This internship is located at the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution Museum Support Center (MSC), 4210 Silver Hill Road, Suitland, MD 20746