mlpalmer

The life of an intern is one of ever-changing duties. When there are a lot of things to get done, especially in a small organization, interns usually have to do a bunch of things to make life easier on the curator and other employees. The History Museum is currently doing a multitude of things, two of which I have been helping with this week. One is the set-up of Fantasyland, the Christmas exhibit the museum does. I spent a couple hours hanging up ornaments and snowflakes from the ceiling to add to the atmosphere of Christmas (too early in my opinion), and the rest of the afternoon was spent in collections doing inventory. The museum is in a tight spot where the collections will soon need to be moved, and much of what we have isn’t properly accessioned and the curator isn’t even aware of what all there is at the moment. The project I will be working on for the next few days is creating an inventory of kitchen appliances and utensils, and then boxing up the items to get them ready to move.

The last month of my internship has been more of the same. I have continued to go between the collections in Center in the Square and the O. Winston Link museum, adding items and collections to PastPerfect in both locations. I have made a few discoveries, one of which being, I despise scrapbooks. I had scan and deconstruct three old scrapbooks from a local sorority and it was a tedious and stressful job. One of the scrapbooks had metallic pages which caused some of the old newspaper articles to rip and be discarded. I learned that this is exactly why scrapbooks are scanned first, so that anything destroyed in the deconstruction can be viewed online.

The most exciting job I’ve had in the past month was accessioning a collection of old books from the Watts collection. I had a true history geek moment when I looked at the dates of publication: the newest was published in 1922 and the oldest were a four volume set of poems published in 1778. I had the honor of handling books published just two years after our nation was born and the weight of it was not lost on me. While I still had the tedious job of entering the books into the PastPerfect system, I had a better appreciation for the content I was entering. The books were in pretty great shape for their age and it isn’t every day that you get to hold four books that are 239 years old.              

The last two and a half weeks have been dominated by folios and PastPerfect in the collections building. I have been going through folios with over sized images. Each folio has a theme of some sort, the two that I have finished are N&W railroad and public buildings in Roanoke. I have looked at more trains than I ever wanted to in my life in the last couple of weeks. As I go through each folio, I separate the images into three piles: no accession numbers, not in PastPerfect, and done. Each image is added to an Excel spreadsheet so that Ashley knows exactly what we have and what we do not. For images that do not have numbers, they are described in the spreadsheet so that we know what they are after they are accessioned. The numbered ones not in PastPerfect create the biggest headache for me.

PastPerfect is a widely used museum system, and it is also the cheapest for a museum to purchase. As the museum I work with does not have a large budget, PastPerfect is the most affordable system for us to use. It is an aggravating item of software as useful as it is. There are dozens of small things to remember to do for each entry and it becomes very dull and repetitive. PastPerfect is incredibly useful as it isn’t hard to navigate and there are more than enough categories so that one is able to give every relevant detail about the object or image. After adding all of the information, I scanned both sides of the images to add to PastPerfect with the metadata for the image. The entire process for one photograph can take anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour depending on how much information there is about the image and if the scan is good the first time around. While PastPerfect is a useful tool for a curator, it is a pain to use.

 

The first few weeks of my internship with the museum have been a fast-paced learning experience. I had no experience with any curatorial work, and my supervisor Ashley had me dive in head-first. Day one, I started on an accessioning project. I got a crash course in PastPerfect and quickly learned just why people dislike the system. However, it was incredibly interesting to look back through ledger pages, letters, and order receipts that someone 80 years ago decided was important to record and keep. As I learned how to digitize and create metadata over the summer during a practicum it wasn’t too difficult to pick up on the process.

After I finished the John Taylor project, I started in on relocating folio art. The change of venue for the museum has made it difficult to find all the items. I have begun to go through each folio, find the accession number of the image, and enter its new location and a description of it in an excel sheet. After that, I go to the old handwritten accession and write out the new location of the photos. It becomes difficult when an object doesn’t have a number or isn’t in PastPerfect. If the former, I have to ask Ashley how to proceed. If the former, I just have to create a new PastPerfect entry.

Overall, it has been a good learning experience so far and I look forward to continue expanding my knowledge and working with different types of objects and images.

(image of PastPerfect entry)