History student inte
Contents Feature Stories History student interns for Library of Congress English alum releases debut novel PoliSci professor releases “Cookbook Politics” Company licenses UWM chemists’ compounds UWM physicist’s research on protein folding Communication alum tackles diversity Meet the new L&S faculty members
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Columns Planetarium Spotlight Laurels and Accolades Video Stories Passings Alumni Accomplishments In the Media People in Print Published College the
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As a public history graduate student, Samantha Dickson needed an internship credit for her classwork. She was supposed to fulfill it with a summer job at the archives in UWM’s Golda Meir Libraries – appropriate, since she is also working toward her Master’s in Library and Information Science. Then, coronavirus hit and student positions were cut. “I was like, who might be hiring?” Dickson said. As it turns out, the Law Library of Congress was – and their internships were all remote. The Library of Congress is the official research library of the U.S. Congress and includes several branches like the Law Library. With millions of materials spanning books, manuscripts, newspapers, congressional proceedings, digital records, and more, the collection is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the buildings have been closed to visitors. But the Library still needed interns for the summer to help compile metadata for its online collections. Dickson originally applied for that position, but the hiring personnel had a different calling in mind. “Because I’m also studying public history and not just for my MLIS, they had me join the Creative Project under the umbrella of the remote metadata internship,” Dickson said. “Basically, I got to go through their digital collections, find things that I found interesting, and then I had the option to do a blog post and/or story map out of that material.” In Dickson’s opinion, pirates are pretty interesting.
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2 • IN FOCUS • September, 2020
“(The Law Library) has a really fascinating collection on piracy trails mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries,” she said. “I was trying to think about what would be interesting to a lot of people – what in pop culture that you could have a legal take on. I think everybody hears ‘piracy’ and
