Summer student internships at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum: developing practical skills and deepening partnerships with the University of Regina as part of a massive collections reorganization

The Friends of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum would like to offer a series of summer student internships that bring university students and recent graduates into a museum setting, to gain hands-on experience alongside research scientists and curatorial staff at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. This experience will focus on preparing collections for a massive move that will see approximately 3.6 million artifacts relocated to a new building over the next two summers. Students will be involved in developing collections and logistics across multiple units at the museum, including Archaeology, Indigenous Cultural Heritage, Palaeontology, Invertebrate Zoology, and Vertebrate Zoology. The internships will cover a wide range of topics that connect the museum to multiple departments at the University of Regina. Each unit will conduct an internship project that focuses on collections at the museum, and getting students to help reorganize these collections through activities such as identification, cataloguing, rehousing, preparing, and collecting in the field. Beyond incorporating student training, these activities will differ from the day-to-day activities of the museum in that the collections involved are those that are in need or serious work or analysis before they can be moved to the new building, and the data associated with these collections provide research targets for future collaborations between the museum curators and their academic partners or co-supervised graduate students. The involvement of students in the project will allow the museum to tackle a much larger section of the collections over the summer, with logistics and organization that will impact how all future users access the material. These internships will provide training opportunities that are not available in a university setting, and prepare students for a wider range of careers.

Faculty Supervisor:

Ryan McKellar;Christopher Somers;Maria Velez

Student:

Partner:

Friends of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Arts, entertainment and recreation

University:

University of Regina

Program: