2017 Internship
Berks County Heritage Center
The Berks County Heritage Center is a 55 acre property that is located along the Tulpehocken Creek in Berks County, Pennsylvania. The outdoor recreation area was once a farm owned by the Reeser family, but was bought by the County in 1978.
The site contains a variety of buildings that help teach visitors of
rural life in Pennsylvania especially in the 18th century. These
buildings are:
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The C. Howard Hiester Canal Museum
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Melcher's Grist Mill
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The Reeser Farmhouse
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The Gruber Wagon Works.
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Deppen Cemetery
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Wertz's Red Bridge
The Heritage Center prides itself in featuring this often forgotten
history of Pennsylvania and tours are offered from the late spring to
early fall.
Responsibilities
Of the many responsibilities I took on during my internship, the main one was interpretive services. As an interpretive tour guide, I provided tours to individual, walk-in groups, school groups, and senior citizen groups. Tours had to be guided in the wagon works as it was not set up like a traditional museum and was in the same condition as when it closed in 1972.
Along with tours, I would often help plan and set-up for festivals. I was a part of three festivals and planned and prepared crafts for each.
Otherwise, if staff was short, or it was a particularly busy day, I would run the snack bar and gift shop as well as maintain the buildings.
Projects Completed
My internship required either one large project, or several projects to be completed during the length of the internship.
One of the first projects I completed was creating a way to transfer cassette tapes to a digital format and found that the use of a cassette player, auxiliary cord, and either windows voice recorder or a similar program such as Audacity, which can be downloaded for free online, can be used to easily preserve recordings.
Next, I completed a "traveling trunk" program for canals. A local canal expert named Glen Wenrich graciously allowed me to record, transcribe, and create a lesson plan based on a traveling trunk program. This helped further develop the program, which was previously not based on interviews.
Finally, my most extensive project was an ethical oral history with Glen Wenrich on the collections held in the Hiester Canal Museum. I had done readings on the best way to conduct an oral history and developed a binder on how to conduct oral history based off of "The Oral History Manual" by Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan. Both the transcribed interview as well as the binder are held in the archives of the Berks County Heritage Center.
Cassette Conversion Reccomendation
Traveling Trunk Program
Oral History Interview
Upon completing my internship, I was required to make a video about my experience at the Heritage Center and then post it to YouTube. Below is the full video of my time including what I did, development and strengthening of skills, and how it fit in with my education and training.