Week 11 | Class Instructions

        Hello all, Aaron here for another week of the Olustee internship. This week was relatively straightforward in terms of work, and even the meeting we had today wasn’t very long. Now that us interns have handed off the burden of Olustee research to Dr. Gannon’s students, we will have less investigating to do ourselves. As such, I actually don’t know what we will be tasked with next week.

        This week, Dr. Gannon instructed us to create guidelines for the research her students would be conducting. This week, she split them into groups based on their stated proficiencies, such as organizing sources in proper formatting, or directing research efforts. She also split the groups by how many sources were available for each of their respective regiments. The 8th USCT became one of the biggest groups, since this week we found all of their CMSRs (compiled military service records) on the National Archives’ website, which is a big find since the only other sites that hosted the 8th’s CMSRs were Ancestry and Fold3, which are both paid resources that students would need to make appointments to access if they didn’t have subscriptions to. Inversely, the 7th NHV group is one of the smallest, as they do not have very many sources to work with: beyond their regimental history (which luckily for us is a very good source), the only other sources are Ancestry and Fold3. I took this into consideration when I created the instructions for both the 7th and the 8th, which I submitted Wednesday night. Dr. Gannon told us to imagine ourselves as a student who had no prior experience doing research for the Olustee project, and to make sure to explain as much as possible, even if it seemed obvious to us. She further elaborated that the better our instructions were, the better the students’ research would be.

        When I wrote my instructions, I mentioned first the sources I believed were most important for each regiment (National Archives CMSRs for the 8th, regimental history for the 7th), and mentioned other free sources after those, then went into how to navigate the paid sources of Ancestry and Fold3. I sent them over to Dr. Gannon and she was impressed, which is good for me I suppose. She says that she wants her students to have about a week to navigate the sources and conduct their research on their own, and then she’ll have us step in after that to assist them with any problems they might have come up against in that time. After that, on April 14, she’ll have them submit a draft of the information they have found, and we’ll look at it to see if they’ve got the right idea, or if the students need to be afforded more time to perfect their research. I’m excited that we’ve finally got to the “team leader” part of the internship mentioned intermittently before now, and I hope that the students can get some quality work done.