Summer in the Archives: Rivers Launches First Summer Internship in the Humanities

Working directly with conservationists during the month of August, Bollar focused on a digitization project, scanning documents from the center’s “Framingham's People of Color: 1600–1800” finding aid, which contains collections pertaining to 17th- and 18th-century Black and Indigenous persons in the area, such as transfers of land deeds, journals, and historical accounts. The eventual goal is to have those scanned documents live online so the finding aid is fully accessible to researchers and others interested in this area’s history.

“Up until this point, I had done most of my learning through classes,” said Bollar, “but I was always curious what it was like to work in an archive or a museum and learn the tricks of that trade.” 

This curiosity led Bollar to reach out to Leeming about potential opportunities for a summer internship. It was perfect timing—as it happens, Leeming was in the process of establishing a history internship program, with the aim of building something similar to Rivers’ science internship program. Bollar was more than happy to be a test pilot.

While his internship focused on helping digitize a specific finding aid, Bollar’s work in the center also enabled him to make connections with researchers and archivists and exposed him to other artifacts in the collection.

One artifact that really stood out was a diary of a teenage musician who had served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Bollar found the diary, and the writer, a teenage fife-player, instantly relatable. “A lot of the things shown in museums are these grandiose things. I felt like this is something I could relate to, as a teenage musician myself,” said Bollar, who is a drummer and percussionist. Bollar said that seeing the teenager’s small doodles in the diary as he flipped through felt particularly humanizing.

“I got to wondering—what were his opinions on the war? Did he see combat, and how did that affect him as a person? It is so easy to get detached from things that happened so long ago, but these events were also perpetrated by people—it’s so interesting to read these accounts and hear about people’s worries, thoughts, joys from long ago,” Bollar reflected.

The staff at Framingham History Center were delighted by Bollar’s contributions over the summer. “Because of the work that Gavin accomplished, he helped us kickstart the process of providing our BIPOC documents digitally on our website and preserving them in this format for future researchers,” said Outreach Collections and Archives Manager Bonnie Mitchell, who was Bollar’s supervisor during the internship.

This is not the first time Rivers has partnered with the Framingham History Center; last spring, students in the senior history seminar titled “Recovering Lost Voices in the Archives” worked closely with the center, using the same finding aid as Bollar to guide their research. They presented their final projects to the wider community in May. 

“I kind of view my work not as a full continuation, but kind of an offshoot of the work that the seniors did last year,” said Bollar, explaining that the seniors engaged with the archives as researchers, whereas his work was more as an archivist and conservationist.

The success of this pilot internship, along with the history seminar last spring, opens the doors to future collaborations with special collections, digging into the rich history of the region. 

“Through classes like the ‘Lost Voices’ elective and this internship, we’re building toward a goal of exposing more Rivers students to hands-on historical research,” said Leeming. “Ultimately, we’d love to make a case for curricular connections with archives and special collections moving forward.”

“I loved every minute of it,” said Bollar of the experience. “It was truly a joy to meet all these people and get to know them, and also learn more about the place I grew up. A lot of people don’t register that we have this rich history, and it was happening here, 10 minutes down the road.”