Internships Blog

I had meant to do this post before the break but never got around to actually finishing it due to all the craziness surrounding midterms.  A large part of our time at the museum the weeks before break involved us preparing for the extremely popular Ghost walk event.  Luminaries had to made, costumes be found and deep storage, and parts of the museum rearranged for the community weekend. I also helped get some members of the historical society at Roanoke involved to get some much needed volunteer work at the event. Unfortunately I was not able to participate because I left early Friday and did not return to late Sunday during East hills ghost walk, and was at home during the performance at Sherwood.  Our next big project is the Christmas toys exhibit, which will be a an event that sees the entire museum turned into a interactive experience about Christmas’ past.

I have been having a lot of fun working at the museum this semester, I honestly look forward to going in every Wednesday.  People in the community can be very passionate about local history and it feels great to share it with them.  It has surprised me how lively the museum is, from the outside the seem like silent stuffy places, but the constant stream of community involvement and friendly people makes every day special and fun.  There is also a lot of satisfaction gained when the events go well, which they all have since I have started. I am also becoming more and more comfortable with using past perfect and finding things within the museum collection.  Its not my favorite task, but Accessioning items into the collection is something I am now comfortable doing on my own. (most of the time)

While prepping for the next exhibit we decided that a Hoop and Stick was a good representation of  pre 1900’s toys, naturally we had to figure out how to actually play with it.

     

Due to Fall Break being an interloper I sadly will not be going in to the museum for the next week which means that this biweekly post will be a bit shorter than usual.  As Halloween draws closer the museum is preparing for its Candy Corn Express event in which visitors of the museum are encouraged to join in the spooky holiday fun by putting on costumes and taking rides on a diesel locomotive that is in the collection.  In preparation for this I have been asked to put up posters on campus advertising the event.  So far I have put up one poster on a bulletin board in West Hall and during my most recent shift I was given several more to place on boards around campus after break.

Since the last post I have mostly been accessioning as the previously mentioned in other post search for one lender’s belongings has been put on temporary hold.  This means that my supervisor and I are currently working on accessioning items into PastPerfect, and that she is taking time to address other concerns of the museum.  These concerns include setting up, conducting, and recording oral history interviews. Sadly my presence was not needed for this and therefore I was not able to partake in the experience.  A great deal of the items I have accessioned lately are from unknown sources.  Because we do not know the donor, but still wish to record the item’s existence in PastPerfect, we have a Accession Number for source-less items.  The theory is that if the items were to have the donor information to be discovered that the accession number can be changed accordingly and until that event they are within the system and can easily be found in a search.

One really fun but technically unproductive thing I got to do was climb up into the cab of the locomotive 611 as is was in steam.  The engineer described the process of running the locomotive, as well as how it is stopped and how coal is used as the fuel source.  All-in-all it was a very informative experience and my supervisor took a picture of me sitting in the engineer’s seat which made my train buff father really geek out.  

Since my last post I have had some more time doing various tasks with my supervisor as well as on my own or with other VMT personnel.  On my own, I have been working on accessioning items into our catalog of collections on PastPerfect.  This is somewhat difficult because a good deal of the material is from an unknown source.  The status of the collection at VMT is not good because the record keeping prior to a certain point was not very good.  There are items in our collection with no accession number, records, or other data connected to it.  Part of my job is to assist the curator with making digital records for each item, using the PastPerfect software, and if information is missing to simply leave blanks that might hopefully become filled in later.  I am currently going through a box of N&W items that are mostly various forms of paper documents.  Some have accession numbers attached to them, others we are not so lucky.

I have also recently assisted my supervisor in locating, mostly aviation related, objects that were loaned by one person about twelve years ago to the museum.  He now would like his loaned items to be returned to him and they need to all be located.  Sadly when the museum received them in 2005, there was not a set practice of recording items or marking/tagging them for our records.  This means that the items are not marked at all except for possibly having the lender’s stamp on them.  They are also not all held in one place and some could be assumed as missing or damaged due to a leak that happened in one area of the museum several years ago.  We have found a good number of items so far but a decent chunk of the list has yet to be located.

The pictures are from when I came in on a Saturday to assist with a Grandparent’s Day event that was put on by the museum.  I sold t-shirts, hats, ornaments, and other gift shop merchandise that was on a special clearance sale.  I was given the t-shirt and name tag to represent the museum as a volunteer and to show off one of the shirts that were for sale.  I even bought two t-shirts as gifts for my dad who is a big railroad fan because the prices were so low for the sale.  The picture of the hanging shirts is an example of how the clearance sale was physically set up with example shirts hanging and folded shirts on the tables for purchase.  It was clever for the hanging t-shirt to be hung up like that and to have the sizes that were available for each shirt design to be written on a piece of paper taped to the shirt to show what we carried.

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.

 

My first few weeks as an intern at the Salem Museum have been very enjoyable. I was fortunate enough to begin my internship just before a number of big events and was thrust right into the middle of museum work. After an in depth tour of the museum, I spent my first two weeks helping with setup and final research for the Roanoke College 175th anniversary exhibit. For this, I got to help design a display case (seen below), conducted some interesting research on the yearbooks of Roanoke College, and worked on the broad setup of the exhibit. Once the 175th exhibit was completed, we jumped right into planning and setting up for the Appalachian festival. In this capacity, I mostly worked doing room setup, though the little bit of advisory event planning I was able to do was a treat. Finally, after the Appalachian festival came and went, I began preparing for the Ghost Walk. This year, I’ll have the pleasure of portraying Charlie Hammit, a Salem native and a little-known star of The Copperhead Serials, a silent film series. I’m very excited to participate in the staple of Salem life and it’s been enriching to research and study the life of Charlie Hammit.

 

The picture to the left doesn’t seem like it’s of much except maybe a few unmaintained grave sites, when it’s actually of an entire cemetery. We had driven over two hours from Salem to look at a couple mortuary sites on a farmhouse property a family had purchased, a common find on properties in the southwest Virginia region. As I’ve learned is usually the case, if a resident knows of one unrecorded archaeological site then they know of others. While the mortuary sites on the family’s property were interesting, the conversation the roadside cemetery pictured captured my attention the most that day. The cemetery would’ve been left unnoticed had a logging company not bought the land. When they found a few headstones, the logging company arbitrarily marked perimeters off with unmarked roadways but most likely destroyed or failed to notice that the cemetery extended further. The rural nature of southwest Virginia means archaeological sites regularly go unnoticed until new landowners come in – whether they may be a company or residents. Tom, my supervisor, explained to us the tell tale signs of a cemetery in the region that we quickly picked up to determine that the roadside cemetery was probably larger than the logging company presumed.

The most obvious indicator of a mortuary site is the presence of a headstone, and – in many cases – a foot stone. The foot stone is uncommon for slave burials since they were usually only marked with a found stone stuck into the ground at the head of the burial. The type of headstone and foot stone depends entirely on the period and individual family preferences. The second most obvious indicator for burials is a depression in the ground from where the soil settled over time. Sealing burials with a concrete casing that prevents the soil from settling unevenly with the undisturbed soil is a modern practice. Another indicator is the growth of periwinkle. Periwinkle is a ground cover that spreads quickly, especially in shady areas. Oak and cedar trees were usually planted around the perimeter to create that shade. Boxwood shrubs and decorative iron fences were popular during certain periods too.

We had made the drive though primarily to study two mortuary sites on the family’s new property. One of the mortuary sites was a small fenced off area deep into the woods from the family that once owned the farmhouse for generations, while the other was a pair of graves in by the stream not far from the house. Both were in wooded areas though. The latter pair would be unassuming to most people because their headstones lacked any markings or shape – they were just thinner rocks stuck vertically in the ground. They were slave burials and an excavation could have possibly revealed more where the headstones were no longer there. There were no depressions in the soil to indicate to us either way. The fenced in cemetery had less than a dozen graves and had the traditional indicators, including the periwinkle, boxwood shrubs, and Victorian iron fence despite having been unmaintained for decades. Interestingly, there was a depression on the outside of the fenced area but it was unclear why.

I must have pulled over twenty ticks off of me that day and the heat was miserable because we had to be covered head to toe since we were in the woods. But I learned that the internship is going to involve working with people of all walks of life and trusting them when they say follow me because they know their land better than any outsider archaeologist ever will.

 

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My first few weeks at the Salem Museum have been a great experience.  We have constantly been preparing for new exhibits and events, making signs and putting new display cases together.  The Roanoke College exhibit was exciting to work on because of the sheer amount of information that I have learned about my school while working.  There is a lot of History and interesting archive pictures that I knew nothing about.  I have also been able to meet a few Roanoke college Alums who were more than happy to share the crazy college stories they had in their youth.  The Proudest moment for me was the Sports case that me and Tyler helped put together.  We spent a lot of time trying to make the perfect design and in the end I was really happy with how the case, and exhibit as a whole, turned out.

The Roanoke Sports Display case right after we finished getting everything just right.

09/18/2017This was the first accession that I made on my own using the PastPerfect software.  The first several days were spent acquainting myself with the software via a training video.  After completing the video, my supervisor walked me through my first accession.  This VHS was the second object for me to make an accession file and the first to do on my own.  Since then I have cataloged well over 30 items.  In addition to making accession records on PastPerfect, I have accompanied by supervisor on walks throughout the museum in which we check on the condition of the artifacts that are part of exhibits.  I also have put in a few hours running a checkout table during a sale at the Grandparent’s Day event that the museum held on Saturday, the 16th.  I look forward to learning more about the discipline of public history in the course of this internship as well increasing my knowledge of museum protocol.

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)

In the last of my visits to the Salem Museum, I finally finished my small exhibit.  As I explained in my previous post, I had already done much of the research for the signage of the exhibit and had thoroughly dug through the museum’s archives to find any objects that were relevant.  All that had remained was to type up the information I had collected and position the objects I had found to shape my exhibit.  These two tasks were not as easy as they sound!

With an exhibit as small as mine, there is a delicate balance between the different mediums that information can be presented.  There is less freedom of choice when your only space is a small table and two walls to hang things on, as opposed to filling an entire room.  Surprisingly, I had gathered quite a lot of information that I felt was both important and interesting enough to be included in my exhibit.  I knew beforehand that I wanted one longer sign that gave a majority of the context and narrative of Lake Spring Hotel/Park, with some small ones spread throughout with other tidbits.  When I began typing up the main sign, it became clear that I had too much stuff to say.  I was over a page before I had gotten halfway through the story of the Hotel.  Something that was impressed upon me throughout my tenure as an intern was that even if we have a sharp and distinctly historical interest in the subject, the museum ultimately has to cater to the visitors.  Most of the museum’s patrons would not be interested enough to stand there and read more than a page of information, especially for such a tiny exhibit.  So, I had to cut my main sign down quite a lot; even more so when Fran, the director, did some edits! However, I was very satisfied with the outcome.

With m signs squared away, I then had to arrange the objects I had selected.  At first I was concerned, for most of what I had were either pictures or items that needed to be hung- I had very few actual “items.”  The presentation of the visual information is just as important as the written information.  To be a successful exhibit, the narrative cannot be derived fully from one and not the other. My signs would convey the story of the property, and my pictures would definitely provide visual context- it would be easy for any Salemite to see the stark differences from the contemporary landscape to the modern.  As for my items, I merely had some wooden souvenirs and two old spoons from the Hotel.  How was I to incorporate those in any meaningful way? The answer hit me when I walked past the welcome desk and saw a magnifying glass sticking out of a office supply storage cup.  An exhibit that is visually and intellectually engaging is one thing, but one that is those things plus interactive is much more.  I arranged my small items and left the magnifying glass there with them and I wrote up a sign telling the onlooker to use the glass to view the intricate details of the man-made objects.  Both of my supervisors loved it!

The process of putting together my exhibit was not as exactly cut-and-dry as I have laid it out above.  Working with the objects gave me ideas for the signs, and vice versa, so at times I would be going back and forth from the table to my laptop.  All in all, though, I feel like everything came together really well!  I employed many of the skills of researching and visual display that Alex taught me, like creating a dynamic of varying heights, for example.  I’m proud of the way my exhibit turned out, and of all that I learned about Salem and the museum process in general.  I am genuinely sad to be finishing this experience, but I am also sure that I’ll be back to the Salem Museum.

 

Finally, here are some pictures of my exhibit:

Here is what my exhibit looks like as a whole.

Close up of the table portion.

The left wall, which features two invitations to balls that were hosted at the Hotel, dating back to the late 1800s.

This is one of the most interesting pieces.  Its a poster (somewhat in pieces) advertising the Hotel that has been sealed over top of a beautiful piece of wood.

This is my main sign, you can read it if you wish!

The interactive portion of the exhibit.

And finally, my supervisor, Alex, and I on my last day.