Digital Collections and Metadata Internships (Graduate or Recent Graduate)

Internship Opportunities

Briscoe Center internships provide opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students as well as recent graduates to develop and enhance professional skills and gain vital work experience in related fields while working directly with historical evidence. The work assigned to interns advances the Briscoe Center’s mission and the educational goals of the student. Specific internship position descriptions are created for each opening and based on the center’s needs at that time.

Graduate Internships

Because most entry-level professional archivist positions require a graduate degree, together with archival coursework and a practicum working in an archive, one of the most important preservation endeavors the Briscoe Center’s staff engages in is training and mentoring the next generation of archivists through an internship at the Briscoe Center. These experiential learning opportunities provide employment for students that meet degree requirements, help develop professional skills, and provide an opportunity to gain vital experience in preparation for launching their career upon graduation. These same students go forth to work in other archives across the country and around the world, helping preserve history for all.

Undergraduate Internships

Working at the Briscoe Center introduces undergraduates to archival work as a potential career choice. Many undergraduates serve as pages in our reading room each semester, where they assist researchers with retrieving and returning material—gaining a foundational understanding of how archives operate in the process.

The Briscoe Center created an undergraduate internship in partnership with UT’s Plan II Honors program, which was designed to provide a broad, liberal, and challenging education for a limited number of students whose high school class standing and admission test scores indicate strong academic potential and motivation. Plan II students take courses in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences along with degree specific electives, which provide considerable opportunities for individual research, writing, and speaking.

Since 2015, the Briscoe Center’s Plan II Internship offers an opportunity to introduce these high-performing undergraduate students to careers in archives, museums, and as historians early in their education. These students work alongside professional staff as research, archives, and exhibition assistants. The internship offers valuable work experience primarily focused on processing collections, preservation of collection material, assisting with exhibitions research and preparation, and working on enhancements to digital collection access.

Digital Collections and Metadata Internships

Interns in digital collections and metadata projects support initiatives to digitize collections for public access and improve the discoverability of digitized items in the center’s digital collections. Interns learn to use the Phase One DT Versa digitization equipment and associated software. This internship provides opportunities to work with reparative description and item cataloging.