kjwest

Since my last post I have had three separate things I have spent time working on.

One of these was working with my supervisor in the researching of images and rejigging the designs for signs/placards within the Aviation Gallery.  I learned that images need to be of a certain size so that when they are blown up for signs that they do not become fuzzy or otherwise compromised.  Images also have to be within Public Domain or Creative Commons so the copyright is not infringed upon or causing delays in the creation of exhibits.  She walked me through the procedure of using Word Publisher to create sign designs for the museum exhibits.

 Above are pictures of some mock-up placards that my supervisor had done.  She likes to take out these mock-ups out to the gallery and see how they look in place.  This can bring to mind any aesthetic or functional changes that might need to be made.

In addition to this project, I’ve continued with accessioning various things within our collection that need to go into our PastPerfect program.

Seeing as today is Halloween, we had our Halloween event back on Saturday.  The signs that I put up before my last post were for this event.  We were encouraged to wear costumes as were our visitors.  I came in and ran a children’s area featuring a craft’s table, temporary tattoos, and handling the free posters that were rewards for our scavenger hunt.  It was a lot of fun for me.  I came to the museum dressed as Velma Dinkley from Scooby-Doo and the kids thought that was pretty fun which is the picture on the right at the bottom.  The left picture below is of the tattoo table with some kids playing with a pet snake of one of our volunteers who was dressed as Beetlejuice.

      

     

Due to Fall Break being an interloper I sadly will not be going in to the museum for the next week which means that this biweekly post will be a bit shorter than usual.  As Halloween draws closer the museum is preparing for its Candy Corn Express event in which visitors of the museum are encouraged to join in the spooky holiday fun by putting on costumes and taking rides on a diesel locomotive that is in the collection.  In preparation for this I have been asked to put up posters on campus advertising the event.  So far I have put up one poster on a bulletin board in West Hall and during my most recent shift I was given several more to place on boards around campus after break.

Since the last post I have mostly been accessioning as the previously mentioned in other post search for one lender’s belongings has been put on temporary hold.  This means that my supervisor and I are currently working on accessioning items into PastPerfect, and that she is taking time to address other concerns of the museum.  These concerns include setting up, conducting, and recording oral history interviews. Sadly my presence was not needed for this and therefore I was not able to partake in the experience.  A great deal of the items I have accessioned lately are from unknown sources.  Because we do not know the donor, but still wish to record the item’s existence in PastPerfect, we have a Accession Number for source-less items.  The theory is that if the items were to have the donor information to be discovered that the accession number can be changed accordingly and until that event they are within the system and can easily be found in a search.

One really fun but technically unproductive thing I got to do was climb up into the cab of the locomotive 611 as is was in steam.  The engineer described the process of running the locomotive, as well as how it is stopped and how coal is used as the fuel source.  All-in-all it was a very informative experience and my supervisor took a picture of me sitting in the engineer’s seat which made my train buff father really geek out.  

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.

09/18/2017This was the first accession that I made on my own using the PastPerfect software.  The first several days were spent acquainting myself with the software via a training video.  After completing the video, my supervisor walked me through my first accession.  This VHS was the second object for me to make an accession file and the first to do on my own.  Since then I have cataloged well over 30 items.  In addition to making accession records on PastPerfect, I have accompanied by supervisor on walks throughout the museum in which we check on the condition of the artifacts that are part of exhibits.  I also have put in a few hours running a checkout table during a sale at the Grandparent’s Day event that the museum held on Saturday, the 16th.  I look forward to learning more about the discipline of public history in the course of this internship as well increasing my knowledge of museum protocol.