The past few weeks have seen me becoming fully integrated and gaining a better understanding of what my internship assignment, The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, exactly entails. The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH) is not a museum, a misconception that often arises. However, this does not mean that their mission is any less critical. This mission is to be a research and educational hub that focuses on culture, heritage, and community as a dynamic and living force. Much of their work comes from their popular Folklife Festival that is celebrated every year, as well as their independent recording label and the Ralph Rinzler Archives. The center strives to highlight accessibility with its work and maintain a policy of shared stewardship within the archives and materials.

My role within the larger mission is to both research and create digital work. I have been assigned three main projects thus far, and they are: to make an annotated Chicago-style bibliography of scholarly sources that pertain to the history of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. I am also focusing specifically on the 1976 Folklife Festival, and I am to research academic and popular sources that discuss the 1976 Folklife Festival. With these sources, I will increase my knowledge of the festival itself, but also further the mission of the center to share cultural sustainability and shared stewardship when I use the materials to create a digital exhibit about the 1976 Folklife Festival.

With the information about the 1976 Festival, I will also assist in contextualizing this research into the upcoming 2026 Folklife Festival, as it will be tailored toward America’s semiquincentennial anniversary. I will help with the idea process and execution, creating digital media related to the 2026 theme, which focuses on various festivals.

Finally, the last aspect of my internship is learning and creating projects with a new digital platform for a mapping assignment. I will be learning and working in ArcGIS to create story maps to offer a bridge to the public about our research and historical storytelling. I look forward to growing my digital humanities skills and becoming more integrated into ArcGIS and the Smithsonian Learning Labs.

My learning goals for the internship focus on three distinct areas. First, I hope to deepen my understanding of how cultural organizations frame and sustain heritage in collaborative and community-centered ways. Second, I aim to enhance my skills, expand my knowledge, and explore new digital platforms that will enable me to understand better the software utilized at the Smithsonian and effectively share my insights in an accessible manner. With this, I can learn how to format metadata better, create story maps, or even become familiar with the Smithsonian’s in-house software. Finally, I aim to enhance my skills in curating and presenting archival and scholarly sources, not only for academics but, more importantly, for the general public. I am very much looking forward to my work at CFCH, and I look forward to gaining a better understanding of sharing and preserving culture.