Adirondack Experience Offers New Internship Focusing On Historic Guidebooks.

Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y. – June 7, 2023 – Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake (ADKX) is pleased to announce receipt of a grant from the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership (CVNHP) to support a fall internship in its library. The intern will describe 300 historical Adirondack region guidebooks in the library’s collection. Spanning a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, the guidebooks capture the burgeoning (and eventually dominant) tourism industry that flourished alongside Lake Champlain and into the Adirondack Mountains. The guidebooks are promotional materials published by rail and steamboat companies, hotel owners and others to entice visitors north from urban centers into the beauty and relative tranquility of New York’s North Country. In additional to text describing the area’s stunning landscape, lodging and accommodations, and opportunities for recreation and amusement, they were often lavishly illustrated with photographs of hotels, images of lakeside vistas, and even hand-drawn sketches of local characters and sites of interest.

The internship offers a unique opportunity for a student to learn in an incomparable setting and to gain hands-on experience working with and increasing access to historical special collections. The intern will work on-site at the ADKX Library in Blue Mountain Lake, NY for 12 weeks in the fall of 2023. The museum’s library collects and shares these evocative historical materials for the use, study and enjoyment of residents of the region and the broader scholarly community. The project is part of an ongoing effort to make the library’s collections more accessible to the public. It builds on a previous grants from CVNHP, which the library received in 2019 and 2021 to preserve, catalog and digitize related ephemera collections including tourism brochures, souvenir photo booklets, transportation schedules and ticket stubs, and hiking club newsletters.

Museum and library school students and recent graduates are encouraged to apply at https://www.theadkx.org/about/opportunities/jobs/. The deadline for applications is August 4, 2023, and the internship will begin in September 2023.

The project is funded by an agreement awarded by the United States National Park Service (NPS) to the New England Interstate Water Pollution Control Commission in partnership with the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership.

About Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake
Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake (ADKX), accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, shares the history and culture of the Adirondack region through interactive exhibits, hands-on activities, and culturally rich collections in more than 24 historic and contemporary buildings on a 121-acre campus in the heart of the Adirondacks. The ADKX offers a broad range of programs and activities including special and permanent exhibitions, the 19,000-square-foot Life in the Adirondacks interactive exhibition, and an outdoor hiking and boating experience on Minnow Pond. ADKX offers daily activities with artisans-in-residence, workshops, lectures, nature walks, family and educational programs, and signature events like the Rustic Furniture Fair, FallFest, and the Adirondack Artisan Festival. The museum is supported in part with donations from the general public, with some general operating support made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. For additional information, call 518-352-7311 or visit www.theADKX.org.