Field Work Term Spotlight: Jay Clark
Jay Clark '26 studies Literature and Environmental Studies at Bennington. For his summer 2025 Field Work Term, Clark is working as an archival intern for the OUTWORDS Archive, which captures, preserves, and shares the stories of LGBTQIA2S+ elders to build community and catalyze social change.
How does your Field Work Term relate to your studies at Bennington?
My Field Work Term at the OUTWORDS Archive continues to build upon my previous experience working in archival settings, which I've gained through prior Field Work Terms.
While Bennington offers some archive-focused classes, I'm working towards attending graduate school for a Masters of Library and Information Science. My Literature studies inform that to a degree, but nothing beats hands-on work, especially in such a technical field.
What does a typical day at your FWT site look like?
As an archival intern, I spend most of my day indexing transcripts of oral histories from LGBTQ+ elders. This involves cleaning up raw transcription, breaking the interview up into smaller, topical segments, and tagging each interview with all relevant keywords, making sure to keep them all standardized to the Library of Congress' controlled vocabulary list. I also do some research and outreach to potential interviewees as needed, and I regularly meet with the team.
What has surprised or challenged you most about your Field Work Term position?
Archiving is an incredibly involved process. The pipeline of research to prep to interviewing to editing to transcribing to finally publishing an interview passes through many hands, demanding a great amount of detail at each step.
When tagging an interview with keywords to make it more accessible and searchable, I have to constantly consider how what I choose to be relevant will impact the research others do and how I can respect both the interviewee and prioritize accessibility and relevance.
What do you hope to do after Bennington?
This is my final Field Work Term! This winter, I'll be applying to graduate programs and working on my thesis. After that, it's (hopefully) grad school and then going headfirst into archival work–whether that be public librarianship or private curation and preservation, I'm not sure yet.