Since my last post I have had some more time doing various tasks with my supervisor as well as on my own or with other VMT personnel. On my own, I have been working on accessioning items into our catalog of collections on PastPerfect. This is somewhat difficult because a good deal of the material is from an unknown source. The status of the collection at VMT is not good because the record keeping prior to a certain point was not very good. There are items in our collection with no accession number, records, or other data connected to it. Part of my job is to assist the curator with making digital records for each item, using the PastPerfect software, and if information is missing to simply leave blanks that might hopefully become filled in later. I am currently going through a box of N&W items that are mostly various forms of paper documents. Some have accession numbers attached to them, others we are not so lucky.
I have also recently assisted my supervisor in locating, mostly aviation related, objects that were loaned by one person about twelve years ago to the museum. He now would like his loaned items to be returned to him and they need to all be located. Sadly when the museum received them in 2005, there was not a set practice of recording items or marking/tagging them for our records. This means that the items are not marked at all except for possibly having the lender’s stamp on them. They are also not all held in one place and some could be assumed as missing or damaged due to a leak that happened in one area of the museum several years ago. We have found a good number of items so far but a decent chunk of the list has yet to be located.
The pictures are from when I came in on a Saturday to assist with a Grandparent’s Day event that was put on by the museum. I sold t-shirts, hats, ornaments, and other gift shop merchandise that was on a special clearance sale. I was given the t-shirt and name tag to represent the museum as a volunteer and to show off one of the shirts that were for sale. I even bought two t-shirts as gifts for my dad who is a big railroad fan because the prices were so low for the sale. The picture of the hanging shirts is an example of how the clearance sale was physically set up with example shirts hanging and folded shirts on the tables for purchase. It was clever for the hanging t-shirt to be hung up like that and to have the sizes that were available for each shirt design to be written on a piece of paper taped to the shirt to show what we carried.