Internships Blog

This is the first of many posts I will make regarding my current internship and as such, it may be just a little bit lengthy. I am interning at the Center for Teaching the Rule of Law which is an on-campus group that, as you can gather from the title, teaches the rule of law and provides resources to teachers on the subject. While interning here I am going to be working on compiling and creating just such a resource. My primary task at the Center is to create a PowerPoint presentation detailing how Magna Carta influenced the United States constitution. I am also going to explore why/how Magna Carta has influenced the American government more so than the British Government and also how it has influenced the constitutions of other countries governing documents.

For the past week, my internship duties have been mainly researching and becoming familiar with the rule of law and Magna Carta. The director of the center has given me plenty of reading to do and it has occupied most of my time. I have mainly been reading research papers on the rule of law by Brian Tamanaha, as well as The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham (who are both experts on the topic). I have also done quite a bit of research on Magna Carta. One thing I found very interesting and helpful was a lecture by A.E. Howard about Magna Carta on the Virginia Museum of History and Culture’s website; I am also reading a book by Howard about Magna Carta that I think will be very useful in relating Magna Carta to the individual governmental documents. For my PowerPoint, I think I would mainly like to focus on how Magna Carta influenced the U.S. constitution and why/how Magna Carta has influenced the American government more so than the British Government. I think the best way to organize the PowerPoint would be to have several sections addressing the different topics. So as a tentative starting point it could look something like 1. What is Magna Carta/history of Magna Carta, 2. How Magna Carta influenced the American government (this would probably be the biggest section and would need its own subsections), 3. Influence, or lack of, Magna Carta on English government and why this differs from America, 4. Why this is important/conclusion. As I get further into the research I will probably add a few more sections to this.

My internship has finally ended.  After four months, I’ve finally finished working at the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation.  It has been a wild ride with mountains of work and the chaos of summer classes.  I spent the last few days of my internship working on the Endangered sites list and did nothing for the Greenbooks sites.  I can safely say the most important thing I learned from this internship is any historical preservation foundation has a lot of work that needs to be done and few hands to do it.  The second most important thing I learned from this internship is the colloquial language of the historical preservation field.

I didn’t add many sites to the list.  Instead, I went back to the old listings and filled in the blanks I still had.  The status of each site is the most common update I did to most listings.  The sites were either listed as saved, lost, or endangered.  The Greenbooks project would have had me go the Roanoke City Main Library and look at their records to figure out the locations of old Greenbook sites.  I was also supposed to contact the Salem Museum for assistance.  From the list RVPF gave me, there was tourist homes, restaurants, and attractions for traveling African Americans of the time.  I was never able to make it the library due to other projects for the internship, summer vacation, summer classes, and family.  With school in session, I need to start focusing on my last semester and say goodbye to the RVPF.  I’m thankful for the opportunity they gave me and I hope I’ll run into them in the future.

 

One of the most important things when you design exhibitions is understanding the new visitors’ perspectives. For 6 weeks, I had looked around all the exhibitions whenever I have free time, and I could understand them deeply and see the mutual relationships among the exhibitions. However, it is hard to expect that new audiences could get that kind of sound understanding of exhibitions.
After interns had come here, the exhibitions improved a lot in terms of participatory. Compare to before, I believe that a broader age group can enjoy the exhibition. (I know this is totally off-topic, but I always wonder why the physically-engaged experience booths are only for kids. I want to know if elderly are really not interested in that kind of thing or they are.)

As basic information about the Salem museum had already updated on the Salem museum website, I tried to give visitors more delicate and detailed stories than that. But at the same time, I hoped that people would not pass by them because of the overwhelming amount of information. (Also, it was hard to find what is the right amount of the signs because I only could use the two walls for my own exhibitions. Also, the wall was located beside the stairs. *_*…) Anyway, I wanted to let visitors understand the big context of the history of the house at least, so I added subtitles for it.

Also, It was uneasy to picking the right pictures and artworks for the small exhibition. I had to compromise to myself and the process helped me to figure out the most effective way to make up the exhibitions. Thanks to Alex, I could hang a high-quality picture for my small exhibition.

I know that it is a scarce chance to have experience in a local museum as an undergraduate student. And it helped me a lot to decide my career. As interested in gentrification and urban revitalization, it was happy to read all the stories of how the old building could survive with the spontaneous efforts of the local people.

Working in the Salem Museum was not always perfectly happy and joyful, but I can say that I learned a lot. I could feel that my supervisor tried to figure out what I am interested in and docents and other interns tried to help me and considerate the uneasiness that I had to confront all the time because of my English. Everyone in the museum was so kind and ready to give me practical and useful advice. For these reasons, if you are hesitating to work in the museum, I highly recommend you to do an internship at the Salem Museum!

p.s. if you have any hard time with making signs with glue spray, try to use glue stick!

At this point in the internship the focus was set on getting all the finishing touches laid out and completed for the fire exhibit. Most of the pictures and signs were already up so what was left was mostly cleaning and last minute touches. All of the display cases were wiped down, the floor was swept (though I wasn’t the one who did that, not trying to take un-due credit), and my boss jokingly threatened to make me wear a smokey bear costume for the entire opening day. While all of this was taking place, I also got what was probably the most fun assignment I received while I was working. I was told to create a scavenger hunt for museum. I was given free reign to use whatever I wanted for it, so I enjoyed myself. It only took me around an hour to make, but as I said it was a good time. There were a few gimme questions, but there were a couple that were particularly difficult. In one case we have a picture of a man named Abraham Hupp on every single floor of the museum and part of the hunt was to find all of them. Without too much of a history lesson, Hupp was a tinsmith, inventor, and he organized the Salem Flying Artillery, who fired the last shot of the civil war, though Hupp died before then. One of Hupp’s more notable creations was the first “fire truck” Salem ever had, even though it was a push cart with a hand operated pump. Anyway, the scavenger hunt had all sorts of questions on it and when I looked through the ones people filled out I was quite pleased. Not a single person completed completely correctly. The closes were a couple kids who missed on question about how many paintings by Grace Smyth there were on the first floor.

My internship is finally about to end.  I’ve spent the past month buried in paperwork.  I haven’t been able to work on the Greenbooks project due to the amount of work needed for the Endangered Sites list.  The RVPF basically wants me to turn decades of records into one Excel spreadsheet.  They even told me I was never expected to finish the project due to how much work there is.  At least I don’t have to do research for the “interpretive markers” now.

This project has been anything but bad.  It’s a lot of work but beats doing nothing in a museum for hours on end.  Here is what I need to use to make my spreadsheet: 20+ emails, a couple folders full of old records, hand written documents that have faded, and old reports from the 90s and early 2000s.  If that sounds lot, that’s because it is!  According to my spreadsheet, I’m only at 171 historical sites and almost all of that comes from the emails.  By the time of I need to turn the assignment in, maybe I’ll get to the first page in one of the folders.

 

It was around this point in the internship that we really got a lot of progress achieved on the Feature Exhibit. The Forestry Department showed up in a major way, donating all sorts of things for the exhibit. We got so much Smokey the Bear memorabilia ranging from comic books, to board games, to action figures, even a life size Smokey sitting on a log. At this point I did the bulk of my sign cutting and fortunately for me, it was revolutionized by the T square. Such a simple tool made cutting signs far quicker and easier with only minor amounts of judgement from my boss. In addition to cutting signs, this is when I learned the most about how to turn an empty room into a full blown tour of the Salem Fire and Forestry departments. The way the exhibit ended up getting set was to separate the room in half at the entrance and guide people through two lanes each devoted to one of the two departments. We got to work focusing on hanging sings and laying out where everything needed to be before cleaning up and  putting on the finishing touches. This is where I learned another interesting thing about the signs in museums and how they need to be placed. When we were hanging up signs I put up a row on a wall to go with some pictures that I put up earlier. Unfortunately for me I had to rehang all of the signs due to one fatal error. I hung my signs too high up on the wall. The height at which a sign gets placed on a wall is just one of the small details that go into making a museum exhibit as good as it possibly can be so taking every single detail into account is a valuable skill in the museum.

As mentioned in the last post, I have more on Past Perfect, the archives, and research for the feature exhibit I worked on in the Salem Museum. Work began in earnest for me on the feature exhibit in which I learned a great deal about what goes into making an exhibit because you can’t just throw something in a case and call it good. The first step of the process for me was to properly learn how to use the archives in the museum. I got on a computer and used past perfect to look for anything and everything we had relating to the forestry department and the fire department. I eventually produced a few really interesting things such as a bunch of sculptures of woodland critters made by Grace Smyth. Grace Smyth was a member of the forestry department and an artist who set up a museum in her house in Salem designed to teach children about anything from Native American life to the forestry department. I also found out that her sculptures were donated by my grandparents who knew her personally. The next step in the process was making pictures and signs. I had no idea what went into just sign making at museums, but once you get it down its actually pretty quick and painless. The fire department gave us all sorts of old pictures and photo albums for the exhibit. I was in charge of taking the pictures and scanning them into the computer so we could have them printed in high resolution and the correct size. While scanning is pretty dull, what came next was a lot more entertaining. Once the pictures were printed and scanned, they were glued onto a poster board and cut out using exacto knives and a whole lot of patience. What I later found out is that there is a list of all the people who interned at the Salem museum that is ranked in order of worst to best that ranks us in our ability to cut pictures out of poster board. I can only hope I am ahead of the curve in this.

It is impossible to convey every single story and fact that the exhibition designer knows into limited space. I knew this though, it was painful to diminish or delete what I knew and what I wanted to deliver to visitors. It is because, in my opinion, the exhibition should not be a kind of an encyclopedia that simply lists facts in a boring way. Rather, it should be a medium dragging public to interact with and pay attention to the stories. When I asked Alex what is the “important” or “valuable” facts that should be shown for visitors, his answer was “the stories that the visitors can be connected to or sympathize with.” It’s still abstract but gave me a new insight.

While I was looking for valuable pictures that would be used for the exhibition, I had to deal with Past Perfect again. Well, looking for artifacts and pictures through the program was much more pleasant than finding the real stuff in storages and archives. Even though I could find the accession numbers, I could not figure out where they were. Things that I was looking for were usually not in the place where Past perfect said they should be!! I was so annoyed and I’m sure I ate a bunch of dirt in the storage :D… After more than 3 hours of hiding and seek in the dusty storage, I gave up looking for things and just scanned pictures from old newspapers in the archives. Whenever I could find out the things and see and touch them, it was like digging out some treasures.

 

 

I was asked to scan and edit some of the pictures from yearbooks that I had worked through before. Simple work, no need to use my brains, at all.

Besides that, even though I was not fully charged in other exhibitions, I helped other interns work on preparing a new one. I could feel how much they take care of visual effects and flows to deliver their intentions and messages to visitors.

Writing signs is quite different from that of normal essays. Considering that visitors are not ‘very’ patient, (To be honest, I don’t even want to read more than 4 lines while looking around exhibitions) the signs should draw their attention quickly, but in a clear way. After four times of confirms and editing, I could finish my writing.

It’s not always hectic or busy to work in the museum. Whenever I got bored, I tried to have a conversation with docents and listen to what they say. They are experts in the local histories. They helped me write signs and confirmed new facts that I had dug up from archives. Also, sometimes whenever looking for some resources, they were more precise and better than looking things into Past-perfect.