A DAMS Good Internship at the Smithsonian Gardens

Archives of American Gardens intern Jessica Brode scanning in the reference room at the Smithsonian Gardens office.

As a graduate student at George Washington University, Jessica Brode has done multiple internships all across the country and even abroad, but with her Masters in Museum Studies she never expected to be interning with the Smithsonian Gardens of all places. What is a museum studies graduate student doing interning with Smithsonian Gardens you ask? Well she isn’t planting or maintaining the various, beautiful gardens around the Smithsonian properties, in fact, she’s actually putting her skills to use at the Archives of American Gardens (AAG). Yes there is actually an Archives of American Gardens and it is where they document images of over 8,500 gardens throughout the United States from dates ranging from the 1870s to the present day. As of now, the AAG maintains over 150,000 images and records on historic and contemporary gardens and gardening trends all of which Jessica was tasked with cataloging using the Horizon cataloging system.

Not only has Jessica been able to use her skills as a museum studies student, she was also able to learn new skills and expand her knowledge by being able to use a system called Digital Asset Management System (DAMS). She used DAMS to rename and reorganize the Smithsonian Gardens folder structure, so that images could be filed by garden and year making it easier for a user to search various images. By reorganizing this system, staff members will be able to easily create slideshows of the best garden images from their respective gardens and make them available to the public through the Collections Search Center and SIRIS.

Read more on Jessica’s internship here.