FHHSAA Student Archives Internship Program
The Fairmont Heights High School Alumni Association (FHHSAA), Historical Committee partnered with the Maryland State Archives, and the PG Arts and Humanities Council (PGAHC) to co-create a Student Archives Internship Program that will provide high school students attending FHHS to assist FHHSAA with identifying, cataloging, recording, and managing appropriate historic materials related to FHHS and the surrounding communities. The Maryland State Archives serve as the central depository for government records of permanent value. The Archives has long made online access to records a core mission through digitization, digital curation, collection development, processing, arrangement and description, conservation and preservation. The Archives’ Special Collections Department supervises the care, preservation, accessioning, and description of non-state agency generated records, which includes collecting personal papers, church records, notes, manuscripts, organizational records, letters, diaries, photographs, scrapbooks, historic newspapers, documents, maps, membership records, meeting minutes, and others associated with FHHS history, families, and communities. PGAHC is able to help FHHSAA to preserve historic artifacts as it relates to historic FHHS and the surrounding communities. The FHHSAA Historical Committee is responsible for collecting the historic material from the FHHS alumni and the surrounding communities.
We developed an internship for students with an interest in archival fields, with professional goals, and previous experience in word processing and spreadsheet capability. The goal of this internship is to process the FHHSAA collections to be catalogued, recorded, and digitized for inclusion into the Maryland State Archives, Special Collections Department. This FHHSAA collection will be available online by using the MD State Archives website and/or the Alumni Original Website at https://fhhsaainc.com
McKenzie Howell was the first FHHS rising senior selected to participate in this newly formed partnership with the MD State Archives Office. Students who usually participate in their summer internship programs have always been college level students. McKenzie is the first high school student to participate in such a program and she was fully funded by the FHHSAA. She spent 8-weeks in the Annapolis Office learning to identify material worthy to be archived, digitizing, scanning, recording, cataloguing, and preparing documents obtained from Fairmont Heights High School alumni.
The FHHSAA Student Archives Internship Program is designed to provide students with real-world experience, valuable skills, and a chance to make a significant impact on documenting the history of our beloved historic Fairmont Heights High School and make them more discoverable and accessible to the general public.