The Summer Collections & Curatorial Internship Position at the Tobacco Farm Life Museum in Summer 2024 is made possible with support from the Mid-West Tool Collectors Association. 

The Tobacco Farm Life Museum is seeking an intern interested in historic artifacts and digitization to work with our collections, which include historic farm tools currently on exhibit or housed in storage. This would be primarily a collections internship that is focused on continuing ongoing inventory work, particularly that of historic tools in the museum gallery and in storage. The intern would update catalog records with more information, images, and location data to give the museum greater intellectual and physical control of the collection. To provide the intern with experience in other aspects of museum work, we would also like them to use the information they compile in our digital collections database (PastPerfect) to create a virtual exhibit about farm tools. This would give the intern experience in both collections management and exhibit development.

The intern must be able to complete 100 hours between May and August of 2024. Applicants must have completed their first year of college before their internship. We accept interns with any major who have an interest in working with history or in a museum setting. We accept both undergraduate and graduate level interns. The internship provides a $1,500 stipend thanks to a grant from the Mid-West Tool Collectors Association.  

The intern’s focus will be the collections and exhibit project, but they may also be asked to assist with daily operations such as checking in visitors at the front desk, leading guided tours, staffing special events, etc. based on need, intern interest, and skill level. 

The Tobacco Farm Life Museum offers a unique opportunity for students interested in working with museums or in public history by providing students the chance to work with artifacts but also to interact with the public and explore a number of career paths in museums. But overall, it offers interns an inside look at what it is like to work in a small, non-profit museum where staff often wear many hats. We pride our internship experience for being hands-on and for allowing students to develop tangible projects that will benefit the museum’s audience and community in very real ways. 

This internship position will support the museum’s mission to preserve and present the history of the rural farming community of North Carolina through these efforts to build knowledge about our tool collection and make that information more accessible. The intern will work with museum staff and be trained in best practices for handling and inventorying museum artifacts, and in digitization and curation of a virtual exhibit.  

To apply please fill out the application here.

Applications are due by April 19th, 2024.