More than 60 Oberlin students have interned at the Oberlin Heritage Center (OHC) during the past decade, providing a resource that has been integral to the museum’s success while in turn learning about career possibilities that incorporate their interest in history.

Now those internships will become even more valuable to those seeking museum- or history-related careers. The center—which encompasses three historic buildings owned and operated by the Oberlin Historical and Improvement Organization—won accreditation in December from the American Association of Museums, the highest national recognition a museum can receive. Only about 750 museums nationwide are accredited, according to the association’s web site, and just 26 (including the Allen Memorial Art Museum) are in Ohio. Accreditation indicates that a museum operates with the highest professional standards.

“Interns acquire solid experience in history museum work and historic preservation, and they work side by side with museum professionals and long-time community residents,” Executive Director Patricia Murphy says. Many students become interns after volunteering in the center or working there in work-study positions, on winter-term projects, and through the Bonner Scholars program.

For students majoring in disciplines in which teaching is frequently considered the primary career option, the OHC has been a springboard for careers in other areas, Murphy says. One former intern now works for a Cleveland architect who specializes in historic preservation, and another is in graduate school studying architectural history.

Despite the benefits interns provide to the OHC, two recent interns insist that an even more important aspect to their work was the enrichment they gained for their own academic studies.

Senior Laurie Stein, a history and English major, has been an intern since her sophomore year. She first worked on the Ohio Historic Inventory, using old city directories, obituaries, maps, genealogical databases, and newspaper articles to research the history and architecture of Oberlin.

“Last semester I took an English course on nature and transcendentalism. Knowing who established the Oberlin community in the 1830s and why they did it helped frame my views of the less successful experiments we studied in the course,” she says.

“For a history seminar, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, a classmate and I designed a hypothetical installation we titled Re-Peopling the Period Room,” she continues. “We wrote a paper describing two period rooms photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Because the rooms are not in their original houses, they exhibit very little emphasis on their former inhabitants. We sought to add that presence by leaving the bed unmade, seating mannequins in the space, and creating an audio tour.” She credits her OHC work for the idea. “Because I know so much about the former inhabitants of the OHC buildings, the rooms have human presences to me,” she explains.

The different theories of museum education taught in the seminar also helped her become a more thoughtful and engaged tour leader at the OHC, Stein says. “While presenting tours, I tested some of the theories we learned and judged their effectiveness by the visitors’ responses.”

Anthropology major Katherine McCardwell, who graduated in December, became an intern at OHC in her first year at Oberlin. Like Stein, much of her work involved leading tours and updating the Ohio Historic Inventory. She also trained docents, worked on the center’s web site, and managed the OHC database of potential members.

Also like Stein, she had “a great feedback loop” between her internship and her academic life, much of which revolved around her work in the anthropology department and laboratory.

“I acquired a good working knowledge of social movements in Oberlin through my work at OHC, and this informed an anthropology paper I did on Westwood Cemetery here in town,” she says. “I was able to interpret changing meanings and understandings of death, as observed in changes in epitaphs and monument iconography, and to create a framework in which to discuss and explain them.”

In the anthropology department’s laboratory, McCardwell helped catalog the Oberlin College Ethnographic Collection, an online database that includes approximately 1,000 artifacts collected as souvenirs or gifts by alumni missionaries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Knowing the town’s evangelical history helped me research the provenance of many artifacts,” she says. “And on the tours I led, I was able to share what I learned about the former Oberlin Theological Seminary and the missionaries it trained.”

Both McCardwell and Stein are continuing their association with the OHC. McCardwell has been appointed a museum fellow through August 2006. She is pondering graduate school with an eye on studying either diplomacy or the development of Third World nations. An alternate plan, she says, would be work in a museum of ethnology, natural history, or social history. Stein has been named a museum fellow for the 2006-07 academic year; the position will help her decide whether to pursue graduate school in museum work, historic preservation, or public history.

The OHC career springboard may yet spring again.

O.H.I.O. and the Oberlin Heritage Center