“Working with St. John was a different experience. It was amazing
because I was helping a community space within Newark that told the
history of the area.”
In the third part of C-Aid, students worked at the Wilmington
Metropolitan Urban League, a chapter of the national civil rights and
urban advocacy organization. In Wilmington, the team helped digitize
thousands of policy proposals and program records into searchable files
and built a digital alumni database the organization can use to connect
with those it has served over the years.
“It was really great to learn how a digital archive was developed
from scratch,” said student Maureen Iplenski about her work at the Urban
League. “These institutional archives can serve a lot of purposes [and]
can support the further growth of an organization. … I am excited to
see how the continuation of this work will ultimately come to serve
these organizations.”
About Museum Studies and Collections Aid
UD’s Museum Studies Program, founded in 1972, is one of the country’s
oldest and best-known training programs for students interested in
museums, archives and other organizations that share their expertise
with the public.
Offering an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate, the
program focuses on service to the community and the field and on
teaching a broad range of technical skills.
The voluntary Collections Aid service project, operating since 2010,
has donated more than 4,000 hours of assistance to improve collections
care at sites in and near Delaware.
This year’s C-Aid was supported by grants from UD’s Partnership for
Arts and Culture and the art storage company UOVO. The funding supplied
equipment and supplies, with each community partner keeping a laptop and
a scanner to continue the work the students began.
The C-Aid teams worked under Cohen’s direction and included nine graduate students and program coordinator Tracy Jentzsch. Then-graduate assistant Kery Lawson, who holds a library degree and has archival experience, helped plan the C-Aid projects and instructed students on archival methods and theory.
Moving forward, Cohen said, “Collections Aid projects will aim to
serve a diverse range of institutions with collections but which may not
consider themselves ‘museums.’ As a result, Collections Aid will invite
students to put their coursework into practice at a broader range of
institutions that relate to the field.”
Article by Ann Manser and Pamela Ahern; photos courtesy of Tracy Jentzsch
Published May 24, 2022