Today marks the one week anniversary of my time interning at he Salem Museum and Historical Society. Even though I have spent so little time there so far, I am already extremely excited about spending the rest of the fall semester at this internship. I have always been interested in history museums and all of the different things that go into creating and maintaining them. This is an amazing opportunity to finally learn about and gain a deeper understanding of this topic.
Last week was mostly focused on introducing me to the various exhibits and rooms of the museum while reflecting on how the space has been utilized. Today, however, I finally got to do something more hands on. I got to help take down and put away objects from an exhibit case and replace them with different artifacts centered around a new theme. I was able to search though the archives using a computer program and then physically find the items that looked like they would fit in this exhibit with the new theme. Although the archives seemed very big and daunting at first, I quickly started to get the hang of things and understand the placement and arrangement of artifacts in it. I honestly got pretty enthralled in this little project so much so that I was kind of disappointed to have to return to campus to get lunch and deal with my other classes and responsibilities that lie outside of this fantastic internship.