In working with the Salem Museum I have come to appreciate everything I have been working on both big and small. After completing my exhibit, Mr. Burke is allowing me to put in some recently donated objects into the Past Perfect database for listing accession numbers, writing descriptions and other necessary information into the software and sorting things in the archives. Luckily of me my first group of items were art related. The donor gave us some artwork by Grace Smyth, a local Salem artist. We were given a few paintings and small animal sculptures, my personal favorite being the larger frog sculpture. It just amazes me how someone can transform clay into something so lifelike. I hope to learn more about her as the semester progresses and to maybe do some personal research around her art. I have a very love-hate relationship with Past Perfect as the software is defiantly useful but also very slow, becoming more and more slow as new artifacts are add to the database. I wish that were able to add more photographs but to my understanding that would make the software run even less efficiently. Some people might not be as fond of this process as I am but I find it fairly enjoyable.
