This is a guest post by Andrew Davis, a chemist in the Preservation Research and Testing Division, who is active in PRTD’s outreach efforts. Andrew works to understand polymeric materials in the Library’s collection, such as paper, adhesives, and audiovisual materials, and he also researches the effects of light and the environment on collections objects.
The Preservation Research and Testing Division never shies away from hosting interns in our laboratories. We’ve had multiple interns working with us at any given time for many years now, ranging from Junior Fellows to HACU/HNIP students to high school students from the American Chemical Society’s SEED program.
As difficult and challenging and unusual as the past year-and-a-half has been, we have still kept up our desire to host scientific interns and researchers in our group, even if we can’t host them in person. As I’m writing this, we have 6 interns working with us remotely, logging in daily from Michigan to Texas to New Jersey to the UK. And since the start of the pandemic in 2020, we’ve hosted a total of 19 fully remote interns, volunteers, and fellows in our lab.
Which begs the question: what in the world does a scientist do without access to a lab?
The most significant aspect uniting our interns this past year has been data analytics and visualizations. That’s true to some extent when we work onsite full time. As scientific researchers, we are always interested in data: getting it, experimenting with it, analyzing it, and presenting it. While interns may not be able to collect new experimental data while working from their home computers, it still is entirely possible to find new ways to analyze or present PRTD’s existing data. We have some ideas that we never had time to try previously. But more excitingly, interns can offer a fresh set of eyes for old data, bolstered by their own experiences with specific new tools and methods that we may not be familiar with.
The interns currently working with us are already finding new and engaging ways of working with our technical data. Some efforts have focused on new visualization tools, and others have looked at ways to better codify and standardize our data to improve interoperability. This data has primarily come from PRTD’s extensive reference sample collection or from the ongoing ANC Project.
Another example of our remote intern projects has been looking at our environmental measurements of conditions within Library buildings or display encasements and starting to correlate those to historic environments from other libraries or wider meteorological data. This will allow us to better understand the interplay of building conditions and outside environment as they affect preservation nee