Internship and Volunteering Opportunities

Looking for a field experience? Even a few hours per week volunteering (or even getting paid!) at an archive can give you hands-on experience in preservation, records management, and information histories-all crucial elements of the information profession, whatever the area.

This list should get you started. You might begin by contacting some of these area archives. Case Western Reserve University offers the biggest local academic archives program, with four working archivists. The Cleveland Memory Project at the Cleveland State University Library's Special Collections and the Digital Production Unit offers projects involving the scanning and cataloging of images and other materials for the memory project, such as the  "Messing About in Boats" site, the "Neighbors on the North Coast" site and the multiple oral history sites that make up the Ethnic Women of Cleveland site, all of which were done recently by SLIS practicum students.  They can also support more traditional collection processing projects. For those who may have a history or geography background, they are doing innovative work with geographic information systems (GIS) user interfaces to local history.

Case Western Reserve University Archives
Cleveland State University Special Collections and Cleveland Memory Project
Cleveland Municipal Archives
Cleveland Orchestra Archives
Cuyahoga County Archives
Hiram College
Kent State University
Oberlin College
Summit County Archives
University of Akron Archives & Special Collections
University of Akron Archives of the History of Psychology
Western Reserve Historical Society