My name is Jonas Tilsted. I am a master student of history at the University of Copenhagen. I started as an intern at the UN Archives & Library Geneva 24th August 2022. I was attached to both the Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives (LONTAD)-project and the Archives Management Unit (AMU). The LONTAD-project ended 31st October 2022. Therefore, I was only attached to that project for two months. By working on the description and correction of metadata for this project of digitizing the archives I got a behind the scenes look of the archives.
I came to the UN as part of the partnership between the UN Archives Geneva and a project called Laying the Foundations: The League of Nations and International Law, 1919-1945. This project is located at the University of Copenhagen. In this collaboration it was an idea to develop a research guide on the League of Nations Secretariat with some academic partners to give access to curated resources. The academic partners each wrote smaller articles on specific parts of the Secretariat, like the different sections. I had the editorial responsibility of this guide. I also wrote a part on the Political Section.
I have done several tasks for the AMU. One of my tasks was to describe non-digitized material on the online platform to show the public that the material exists in the archives and can be consulted. This way researchers somewhat knew what could be expected before making the journey to Geneva. An example of the material that I described on the online platform is material from the Association of the Nordic Folk High School in Geneva and the Brochure and Pamphlet collection. Further, I wrote a short article about the Association of the Nordic Folk High School in Geneva to the archives’ blog. I also gave guided tours of the UN Geneva Museum which presents many archival documents. The groups joining the tours and their interest varied. This forced me to change my tour depending on the group joining the tour.
My internship has taught me how much work goes into the process of making material available to the public and making it easily accessible and easy for the public to find. It is not just about scanning a document and uploading it to a platform. It has also taught me about all the different tasks that an archive has. There is a lot of different tasks, like overseeing a museum, that one doesn’t usually associate with an archive.
All in all, my internship has been a very good experience! I have learned a lot that I can take with me in my future work. Even if I don’t end up working at an archive, I can still use a lot of the skills that I learned and the experiences that I’ve had.
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