Life of a Student Intern During the Archives Move
By Kaitlyn Leib
May 2026
Hello! My name is Kaitlyn Leib, and I was the Processing Intern at the Indiana State Archives during my last year as a graduate student at Indiana University Indianapolis. I graduated in May with an MA in History with a focus on Public History and an MLIS with a specialization in Archives Management. Originally from Northeast Ohio, I received my BA in History from Kent State University in 2023.
Throughout my time at the State Archives, I was a part of numerous different projects. I split my time between preparing the collection to move to the new building downtown and processing tasks. The moving projects included barcoding the collection and ensuring that all the records that were moving were properly labeled and safely stored. This often involved manually putting up to forty cubic foot boxes on a pallet, which was more physical than I thought this internship would be!
Prior to this internship, I had no processing experience. I started on smaller collections to get a handle on the practice and eventually worked towards a bigger project. One of the collections I found most interesting was insanity reports from Vigo County around the 1850s. I made notes of the reported causes of insanity, which included a range of causes from “unhappy times” and confinement, to money and love troubles, and even a case that difficult schooling was the cause. The biggest processing project that I worked on was the Chief Medical Directors’ Files from the 1970s. The collection originally contained 28 cubic feet, but after I finished processing it had shrunk to 21.6 cubic feet. These records taught me a lot about Medicare/Medicaid, health care policy, and how Indiana was affected by changing federal and state guidelines.
In April 2026, I presented a poster at the Society of Indiana Archivist annual meeting. My poster, “The Life of a Graduate Student Intern During an Archives Move,” focused on tips and tricks that I had learned from managing different projects and activities for this internship and for graduate school. I was honored to receive the Thomas Krasean Student Scholarship to attend this meeting, which taught me a lot about this profession and gave me lots to consider for my career. [See full poster below]
I am very grateful for the experiences and mentorship I gained during this internship. I know that I grew a lot as a person, student, and archivist while in this role. After graduating, I will be working at Cleveland, Ohio’s Western Reserve Historical Society as an intern with the Louis Stokes Congressional Collection.
