The first two weeks of my internship at the Bowman Museum have been great! I have already learned a lot about the area, the Museum, and how the museum is ran. For my internship, I work with the Collections Manager, Sarah, and I have been learning about the process for cataloging new and current collections as well as the care for all of the different collections. Not only am I learning about how the Bowman Museum works, but I have also been learning how other museums in the area run and their connections to other museums.
My first day consisted of touring the museum, seeing the offsite storage, and the surrounding area. I also began learning the process for cataloging and caring for the new donations to the collections.
On the second day of my internship, I had the opportunity to travel with some of the museum staff to the Maryhill Museum in Washington. It was really cool to see the exhibits of this museum and to see how it differed from the Bowman Museum. We also got to talk with the Executive Director of the Maryhill Museum and learn how they use the surrounding land and other assets that the museum has to make money to maintain the collections. We were also lucky enough to get to see their archives and the collections stored there. It was interesting to see how other museums store their collections and how they care for them as well as see how it compares to what I am currently learning about during my internship.
Throughout the past couple of weeks, I have been mainly working with new collections and learning how to add them to the museum’s collections. At first I started with easy objects and Sarah walked me through the steps and helped me to designate accession numbers. Slowly, I have been learning about the different ways to attach accession numbers to collection objects depending on the materials on the objects. I have learned that sometimes this can be the longest process when cataloging new collections, but also one of the most important.
We spent one morning at the offsite storage building and we started going through the objects that were there. We would use a sheet of paper to hand catalog the information and take pictures of each of the objects so that we could go back to the museum and try to update the files on these objects. However, the hard part about doing this is that many of the objects didn’t have accession numbers written on them, making it difficult to find an existing file. It is especially hard when the object out-dates the electronic system, meaning the only records for this object are on paper. This was pretty cool to see some of the stuff that is not stored at the museum and to figure out how to update their records.
Overall my internship is going well and I am enjoying my time at the Bowman Museum. I look forward to what I will be learning about in the coming weeks.
