Externships: It’s Good to Get Out Once in Awhile
Joyce Rambo, Nylink Reference & Digital Preservation Resources Librarian
One of the first things I realized when I was embarking on my month-long, one-day-a week externship at the Albany County Hall of Records this past April is that an old town like Albany sure has a lot of great old stuff. Little did I know as I walked into the Albany County Hall of Records, located in a former warehouse in downtown Albany’s Nipperville, that I would soon be treated to a reading room hung with 19th-century maps
of the City of Albany (”so that’s where the Erie Canal used to be”) or valuable histories about Albany’s many historic homes, parks and buildings, or a hand-drawn, 23-foot- long map from the 1800’s of the Albany Post Road that marks taverns, inns, meeting houses and homesteads from Albany to New York City.
I immediately recalled one of the basic tenets of my archives class in library school: many of the documents we generate today will be tomorrow’s precious clues to how we live today.
Read more about Joyce’s externship in the Spring 2009 issue of Nylink Connection.
