Guest post: Summer Public History Intern Sadie Ingram

My name is Sadie Ingram, and I had the opportunity to work on the European Jesuit Library Provenance Project remotely with Professor Comerford during the summer of 2020. I am currently working on my Bachelor’s degree (History, Georgia Southern University, projected graduation May 2021). I think that the unusual time in which we live reinforces the importance of having online archives like the European Jesuit Library Provenance Project. Allowing people to access these valuable educational resources is important, especially during a world-wide pandemic. I am grateful to have been able to help in creating and maintaining a platform for making such resources available to the public.

I am excited to say that the galleries are now mostly completed, at least for the books that Professor Comerford has photographs of. During my time working on the project, I uploaded hundreds of images to their proper galleries. I fixed minor issues within the galleries, such as misspellings, publication errors, and image errors. I also learned about the process of creating online archives and the hard work needed to create one successfully.

The European Jesuit Library Provenance Project has an Instagram page. I encourage you to follow @jesuitprovenance. In addition to uploading galleries and making edits, I posted to the Instagram page. At first, I was eager and nervous to interact with the project’s social media audience. It ended up being something that I looked forward to each weekend. I settled upon posting about the different parts of books during my internship. I posted about everything from frontispieces, pastedowns, and printer’s marks, to covers and clasps. With every post, I learned something new alongside the project’s Instagram followers.

Overall, I am excited that I took the opportunity and interned with the European Jesuit Library Provenance Project. I am grateful that it introduced me to the other side of the online archives that I use so frequently for my own academic research. I also appreciated the humbling experience of writing Instagram posts. It helped improve my writing for a general audience instead of a purely academic one.