Week #2 was a mixed bag of projects and office duties that consumed the 20 hours last week. The team leaders at APS wanted to make sure that my time at their facility meets the standard for the Public History program and we came up with ideas of how to fulfill this by completing a research project on APS itself. Their ultimate goal by the end of my internship is to have a collection of their history put together in a logical order of its existence. I was happy to take on this project for the familiarity of past research projects completed within the Public History program so far. In between smaller projects that APS found they needed assistance on, I dug through American Public Square’s archived(mostly boxed in closet & not organized in any fashion) materials. It ended up taking most of the week to sort through the material and organize it to its group. There were numerous duplicated materials on hand and made it harder to verify but at the end of the week I narrowed down the material that WAS NOT needed and grouped other materials by issue or event. I am currently taking a break from this to assist on another project that will consist of researching panelists.

I was asked to complete another small project that needed organization for the Executive Director, Claire last week. For this project, I assisted Claire in re-organizing APS’s Receipt Logs for 2019. Apparently the logs were underwhelming disorganized and Claire felt it needed attention asap. What I did to assist, was break down the file into 3 sections for her, which, for her, made more sense. Paid receipts, Receipts paid, and Merchandise Receipts. I attached all banking correspondence to each transaction and put the logs in descending order. The file was returned to Claire in a new organized fashion that will help her now.

Last week i was also asked to start researching panelists or the upcoming APS forum on the #Metoo campaign. For this, I felt that I needed to educated myself on some of the leading activists and the #Metoo founder’s message / become familiar with their website to find current issues/talks, etc…. And I needed to start thinking about the panelists who I wanted to share as a more of conservative stance. For me, this is a bit hard because I know where my beliefs lie and its hard to be in the middle….so I need to present my picks with activist/bio detail by July 8th. I know I want to pick Tarana Burke, the founder of the #Metoo movement. I know she is willingly to come to speak in this area, she has does this in the past in Kansas State University.

For the #Metoo movement and the for the conservative panelists, I plan to look for local panelist first and turn to websites, twitter, blogs, newspaper articles for contacts and ideas. (the #metoo website has been really helpful–their site links to a persons demographic area and links to resources, etc…..)

So most of these projects are continuous projects, so stay tuned.