Ashley Hedges

The project that I am working on in the Valparaiso University Archives is about the University Composers’ Exchange which involved the Valparaiso University Music Department, as well as music departments all across the Midwest. The University Composers’ Exchange lasted from 1952 to 1965, and involved schools from across Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. This program provided a forum for composers to show off their various works to a large audience. I work with the letters within the documents for the organization and continuation for the exchange and digitizing the reel-to-reel tapes of the performances.

The internship gives me the opportunity to have hands-on experience with primary documents. As a history major, this grants me experience in scanning, cataloging, and researching all of these documents. This internship gives invaluable skills to a historian that a classroom is unable to provide.