Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Inspiring All Who Visit | Page 14

Graduate Student Interns Learn About
Archives in Mount Auburn’s Historical
Collections
By Amanda Baker and Erin Butler

Every fall and spring, Mount Auburn’s Historical
Collections Department hosts a graduate student internship
from the Simmons College School of Library and Information
Science. The internship is a part of the Introduction to
Archival Services course, which is the first step for students
concentrating in archives. The interns learn the ropes of
archival processing by helping to preserve the Cemetery’s
Lot Correspondence files.
The information contained in these files assists the operations
of the Cemetery every day. Documents in the files may
include lot work orders, planting plans, monument plans,
genealogical information, and correspondence with families
through many generations. Many of the documents in the
Lot Correspondence files are quite old and fragile, and
proper safeguarding of these valuable documents ensures
that the information will remain accessible to the office
staff and families for years to come.
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This fall, there are so many new archives graduate students
at Simmons that Mount Auburn hosted two of us: Erin
Butler and Amanda Baker. We offered to interview each
other about our experiences with this internship.
Amanda: What made you choose Mount Auburn for your
Archives internship?
Erin: When I was growing up, I was a huge fan of the book
series “A Series of Unfortunate Events” by Lemony Snicket.
It fostered a fascination with things that some might consider
morbid. I loved that the series talked about danger, death,
and misfortune in honest and open terms, because it
completely challenged the conventions of what was
proper to talk about. When I saw Mount Auburn on the
list of possible internships, I immediately thought back
to this early interest in the “morbid.” I wondered, what
sorts of records are kept in a cemetery archives? How