Emily Hurst was puzzled when Library of Congress staff interviewing her for a summer internship in Washington, D.C. asked if she would mind wearing a mask and apron, or lifting 40 lbs boxes.
"We're going to be in the basement somewhere?" she remembers asking.
Hurst and 20 other interns spent the summer sifting through dusty boxes in America's proverbial basement: the Library of Congress' Copyright Office.
The Library normally hires college students in the summer for its Junior Fellows program. These interns assist staff in cataloguing and researching material for departments of the Library such as the American Folklife Center, or the Veterans History Project. For the first time this year, the Library hired 21 additional summer interns to work specifically on a special project commemorating its135th anniversary.
The goal of the project: sort through almost a century of virtually untouched copyright records.
Between June 6 and Aug. 12, the interns combed through dozens of dusty boxes of backlogged or "not fully processed" material, uncovering historical songbooks, photos, published works and speeches.
"Some of the stuff hasn't been touched in a 100 years," said Frank Evina the summer interns' project manager. "It's dirty work."
Although no American University students were hired this year, Evina said he's hoping publicity from the interns' discoveries will encourage more students to apply next summer.
The copyright submissions "are the mint record of American creativity," Evina said. "After they were printed they were stuck in an envelope and mailed to Washington. Some of this stuff is like it was printed yesterday."
Some of the most interesting items unearthed in the interns' treasure hunt were put on display for Library staff, Evina said.
All the materials that were uncovered were catalogued and are available through the Library's general collection, Evina said.
The interns worked in each of the four copyright divisions: Prints and Photographs; Music; Manuscripts; and Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound. Their summer labors barely scratched the surface. In the Prints and Photographs division alone, a pair of interns went through only 46 of 1,700 boxes. Their search uncovered 4,000 previously undocumented graphic images.
"Looking at the stuff we've found here," said Hurst, who worked in the Prints and Photographs division, "there's no telling what could be in the other boxes."
The Library receives almost 600,000 copyright submissions each year, Evina said. He said he is hoping that the project will be funded again next year and "inspire young people to get interested and get creative"
