A major piece of this Mellon-funded project is the Intern Blog, which is required of each intern across our nine collective academic institutions. Intern Blogs offer first-hand storytelling from the interns at their community archive sites. Blogs share their experiences, their perspectives on archival practices, their engagement with community archives materials and histories, and their learning from within local communities themselves.
-
Community, Storytelling, and a Sense of Place at the MexAm Museum
By Elise Dunand, June 2026 / FOCAS Intern 15-26 / University of Arizona During this spring semester, I assisted in the processing of oral histories and the reopening of the Sosa-Carrillo House. Most of the work I did was remote, the museum being in the process of moving back into the House, but it only…
-
Archives gaies du Québec
By Leo Jones, June 2026 / FOCAS Intern 25-26 / McGill University For the final year of my Master’s of Information Studies (MISt) at McGill University, I had the opportunity to be the FOCAS intern at the Archives gaies du Québec (AGQ). Having recently turned 40 years old, this archive celebrates, preserves, and diffuses the…
-
Notes from McGill…
By Madison Lemke, June 2026 / FOCAS Intern 25-26 / McGill University Over the past eight months, I have had the pleasure and privilege of interning at the CIDIHCA, le Centre international de documentation et d’information haïtienne, caribéenne et afro-canadienne in Montreal, Québec. The CIDIHCA has operated for over 40 years as a non-profit cultural…
-
Community Archives in Practice – The Dunbar Pavilion
by Crystal Nguyen, May 2026 / FOCAS Intern, 25-26 / University of Arizona During the Spring 2026 semester, I interned at the Dunbar Pavilion and stepped into the world of archives for the first time. Not only did I learn common archival practice but I also built bonds with members of the local community and…
-
Multimedia in the AQA
by Cosmo Brusa Zappellini, May 2026 / FOCAS Intern, 25-26 / University of Arizona With a background in film production and editing, I primarily worked with the video and audio materials at the Arizona Queer Archives (AQA), organizing, restoring, and overall creating fuller digital artifacts. Primarily focusing on the Oral History and Phoenix Wheeler collections…
-
Internship at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive
by James Hellebuyck, March 2026 / FOCAS Intern, 25-26 / UCLA I have the privilege of working for the Skid Row History Museum & Archive as the Mellon Intern, and my favorite part of the work is being able to witness the relationship the archive has cultivated with the community of Skid Row. There is…
-
Internship at the La Historia
by Emily Torres, February 2026 / FOCAS Intern, 25-26 / UCLA My journey with La Historia began before I earned the Mellon position–back in 2025 during the Winter quarter of my first year–when I partnered with their previous Mellon intern to make a short film about the archive for our Media Archiving class. Immediately I…
-
Connections in the Collections: Archiving at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California
by Zoe Lee-DiVito, October 2025 / FOCAS Intern, 25-26 / UCLA Working as an archival intern at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California has taught me so much about archival processing and the unique role of a community archive. Situated in downtown Los Angeles Chinatown, CHSSC is part of the local Chinese American community.…
-
Building a typology of Canadian Community Archives through a provincial mapping project
By Rohini Singh, Master of Archival Studies / University of British Columbia Introduction The FOCAS project at the University of British Columbia took off in summer 2024 under Dr. Jennifer Douglas with two community archives student internships, a curriculum development project and an exercise of mapping British Columbia-based community archives. I joined the project as…
-
SAA Reflection / The Affect of Carework in Archival Practice
By Nicole Hayes, FOCAS Intern, Spring & Fall 2025 / University of Arizona This year’s SAA Conference took place in Anaheim, and although it’s only a day’s drive from Tucson, the relief from the brain-melting summer heat was immediately transformative. It has only been two months since the conference, but admittedly in the present political…