remceldowney

For the last two weeks of my internship, I worked on finishing my exhibit for the museum. I spoke about how I researched for the final exhibit on three separate topics concerning COVID, that for me it was important to describe how businesses, schools, and hospitals dealt with COVID. I chose these three things because they impacted so many people and these were the places that continuously kept being reported in the news. It was important to get the feeling people felt and the immediate aftermath of everything once COVID spread. I created a large timeline including the general timeline regarding how COVID spread. What I didn’t count on was formatting it into something that would be digestible and readable for others. This took the longest time and was the most frustrating due to many small fixes to get everything perfect. I thought it was important to include the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of vaccinations. That way through the timeline the audience could see how things developed through 2020 and 2021.

I also included photos from the first people getting vaccinated at the Bergland Center and the 900 chairs set up to represent the deaths across the Roanoke and Allegney health district. I thought it was also important that people saw the physical devastation that COVID had, especially since everyone in living memory has experienced COVID firsthand. I wanted this to mostly be documentation about things from the immediate passing of COVID, this is important for future generations. These two pictures along with two graphs showing the hospital bed capacities at both Carilion and LewisGale. It was important to visibly show how COVID impacted hospitals, as many saw on the news how hard it was for healthcare workers. I wanted this to be a starting point for someone farther down in years, for them to be able to understand exactly what happened when for many of us the anxiety kept building every day.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been deciding what my final days will look like at the Salem Museum and I have been trying to create my own exhibit. I settled on creating an initial exhibit about Covid that collects data now, the feelings of the public now who experienced the pandemic, and how we share those things beyond these years. What has been important is recording the initial feelings, how people got through the pandemic when everyone was in lockdown, and how we document those things to be saved for later. In an attempt to do those things the Salem Museum has been saving the Salem Times-Register’s newspapers since the Salem Museum has none. This got us thinking about how do we save digital artifacts such as photographs or jpegs since people may be unable to access these in years to come.

I settled on doing the exhibit about Covid since it does touch on something that has greatly impacted my life and the lives of everyone around the world. I wanted to personalize this for the Salem area, how were local people impacted, how were schools impacted, and what did regular people do in order to combat the pandemic locally. It’s important to record this since nationally we can understand how The United States and other countries reacted but this was a global event that also impacted localities.

I started with three topics I thought would be important to this exhibit and that was how schools, businesses and hospitals were impacted. I looked at how schools prepared to reopen, creating a timeline that illustrated how students were expected to learn. Businesses were also another topic I wanted to highlight within the exhibit since I personally remember seeing the articles regarding how many feared they would lose their livelihood due to Covid. I wanted to show that communities rallied behind businesses and still attempted to help others out. Lastly I consulted statistics from the local hospitals in an attempt to understand how impacted this area was by Covid.

However in the past few days the museum has been preparing for the local school art show they host so the large exhibit in the foyer has been taken down. I have put back many of the artifacts to their places in the archives and helped to arrange the space for the incoming art exhibit.

Throughout past weeks I’ve interacted with patrons more, maybe a more typical museum experience. Discussing things over the phone with patrons such as the exhibits that are featured within the museum, scheduling events, and referring callers to other resources. It allowed for more personal connection with people and how they interact with the museum. Especially for a small museum being able to interact well with regulars, patrons and people who are simply asking questions; allows for deeper connections with the community. The museum is for the consumption of the public and they are the greatest asset. Setting up events to make everything accessible and being aware of the communities desires. Alex and Fran have been doing extremely well with this, especially when I got patrons asking for them specifically is watching how they help others in their requests from the museum.

For the final bits of my internship I have been planning a personal exhibit to end my time at the museum. Since the last two years of my life have been centered around Covid I decided to develop an exhibit around Covid. I talked to Fran about concerns the preservation of materials that are connected to events happening now. We talked about how to preserve things for future generations. For instance the accessibility of images through digital means: that in 50 years .jpegs might be unable to be accessed. So we must think about how we present information in the past but also how we save information. Especially since everyone right now has lived through the Pandemic, how does an exhibit present current experiences? Questions to ask ourselves would be how much political commentary do we include, the emotional input, and the social impacts too; do we include these things as facts and cause controversy? It is something I will ask for guidance on how to develop this exhibit.

During my entire time at the Salem Museum I’ve accessioned many things: from lighters, books, records and now a water pipe from the 1800’s installed within Salem and donated by the City of Salem. While this is a small thing, I still think that it is interesting that it was donated by the city itself and that they had the interest to have someone save part of the pipe and bring it to the museum. I think it’s something that is interesting to save, but again this goes back to the idea of how to save things and what to save. I think that this water pipe can and will be utilized by the museum later on in an exhibit somehow. It’s interesting to feel that the artifact I accessioned will be utilized by someone else many years down the line to explain life in the 1800’s.

Since the last update, the Salem Museum has now opened to patrons which have been nice to see the daily workings of the museum. This means that an integral part of the job, interacting with visitors, has now been added to my experience. It has tested me on the knowledge of the museum itself: where the exhibits are, details about them, how they connect to Salem, and how the patrons can interact within the exhibits.

Within the past few weeks, I have been asked to do particular tasks around the museum other than interacting with the visitors. I have prepared the signage for two exhibits, worked on accessioning new artifacts into the collection, researched two specific topics for a new exhibit, and created the signs for another exhibit. For me the research feels like a visual paper, gathering the information and selecting what is most important for the public to be aware of. However, I struggle with pairing down my information from the collegiate way I have been trained to write and it has been frustrating to attempt time after time to get the facts accessible and digestible within the specified area. I think this is something that I have struggled with overall but it is especially seen within this field. I do believe this will also help me within my own writing later as I will be able to pair down what I am saying to the bare-bones facts.

It has been interesting to see the different factettes of museum life but one thing I am drawn to is the quieter aspects such as research, placement, creation of the exhibit itself. The physical aspect of researching the topic and finding information on that particular thing that could change the way I’m researching has intrigued me. Choosing what information will be prioritized within the exhibit and how it will be displayed is important, and it’s something that I enjoy. Especially the placement of items within the exhibit, how they are seen on the walls, how they connect to the artifacts, how they connect to each other and the story they tell together is important. For this, I have included the photo of finished signs that will be displayed regarding the silhouette of Andrew Lewis and the id tags for photographs within the Civil War exhibit.