Internships Blog

The start of my internship has been a productive one thus far. My supervisor is Alex Burke and so far he has taught me a gargantuan amount skills, such as using the PastPerfect archival software. The PastPerfect software is used by many different museums as it is possibly one of the most effective so I am told. Although a majority of it is is on the computer, one must fill out 2 or 3 separate sheets that give detail as to what the object is and its characteristics. I found it to be difficult sometimes because often people drop off items without giving details, which makes it more difficult to construct an accurate accession.

Another task that I have been fulfilling is helping create and exhibit on some of the oldest houses in Salem. One of the houses known as Preston Place is the 4th known oldest building in the Roanoke Valley. With this house I have researched the line of people that have lived in the house as well as owned the property. Another house that I have been doing research on is called Old Castle, which was one of the most ornate houses in Salem that contained so much history. Unfortunately Old Castle burned down in a freak accident in the mid 20th century, however there is a plethora of artifacts that were saved from the fire which the museum has been fortunate enough to have obtained. Some of the artifacts were such things as a mirror as well as a Union Calvary sword as well as a Black Powder revolver, which were given on loan from a member of the Salem Historical society.

As for my first weeks at the Salem Museum, I have really enjoyed the time that I have spent thus far there. I mostly enjoy it because I am so use to the history of my hometown, so learning a deeper history of Salem is essentially a whole new world. I look forward to continuing the internship for the rest of the semester.

I have really enjoyed the start of my internship at the Roanoke History Museum. I was placed to work with Ashley Webb. The Roanoke History Museum is moving from it’s previous location in the Center in the Square building to the Link Museum in Roanoke. So to start off my internship, I have been helping set up exhibit rooms in the new location. Since they are moving locations, everything in collections has to be accounted for. A volunteer named Wendy, another intern from Hollins named Laura, and I got to be in charge of going through the shelves of items and looking for the identification number then cross-referencing in a donation log and then typing up everything in an excel document.

 

My next two days consisted of Laura and I going through each item on the shelves. Some of the items that stood out in my mind were World War 1 American Red Cross nurse uniforms, one that we looked at had small stains which looked like it could have been blood. Another item that I remember was a wedding dress with handmade lace and beadwork, it was worn in the 1830s. Next week, I should continue on doing inventory but Ashley said I could also be working on more exhibits in the museum.

The start of my internship has been fantastic.  I was placed at the Museum of Transportation under the education coordinator Courtney Plaster.  So far, I have worked mostly with field trips and education activities.  To start off my internship, I attended the 4th grade field trip training on January 6th.  On that day, I was introduced to the volunteers and learned how to monitor the different stations.  Each station pertains to the Virginia SOLs and can help the students understand concepts in a tactile manner.  Later that day instead of leaving, I stayed in the museum and explored.  I found it imperative that I understand the facts in each exhibit.   Then, last week I began to shadow the 4th grade field trips on Thursday and Friday.  The field trip on Friday went wonderfully.  I helped/shadowed in the “Safety Car” where students learn about the dangers of trains and the tracks they run on.

Then, on Friday, there was not a group of students so I was asked to look at the museum labels in the automobile gallery.  Courtney told me that I would be working in the auto gallery station with the fourth graders and that I should be knowledgeable about each car. Thus, I started taking notes from each sign.  Yet while taking notes, I found errors in spelling on the museum labels and made the museum staff aware.  That afternoon, I started working on an educator’s pamphlet that needed serious updates with new SOL and picture modifications. Therefore, today I worked the auto gallery with another volunteer without any hiccups. Surprisingly the students have been attentive and engaged!  Everything I have done at the museum has been fun and interesting.  Next week, I will continue to help with field trips and begin analyzing the exhibits from a historian’s perspective.

*Below are some of the pictures I have taken around the museum for the new pamphlet to be mailed out for the Roanoke Valley educators.

                                     

 

My last week at the Virginia Room once again consisted of digitizing materials.  This time it was digitizing the postcard collection.  These postcards are of various locations around Roanoke including the city, Salem, and Mill Mountain.  The collection itself spans over many years and it is easy to see the changes that the area has gone through.  The post card collection itself includes postcards of Smith Mountain Lake, Shawsville, and other places around Roanoke.  These were not digitized because they were not used as often, and there would just too many to digitize at one time.  It is important to digitize this collection because it is one that could be used often as a reference when doing larger research about the area.

The process itself is one I have done many times at the Virginia Room, but it is an important one to go through to get as much information as possible out to the public especially if they cannot make it into the Virginia Room.

The next task I got to preform was entering the data from an index.  The news articles by Raymond Barnes are some of the best reference to the history of the Valley.  Digitizing these articles would be extremely helpful to the people trying to do any kind of research (there is even an article on napkin rings) whether it be about an event or trying to trace one’s genealogy.  Typing all the data from the index into a google doc is time consuming often feels like there is no end in sight.  Barnes covered many different topics and people.  The articles were mostly written in the 1960’s with a few in the late 1950’s and early 1970s.   There are hundreds (I lost count somewhere after the Lewis family) of articles and the process itself has taken the whole week to accomplish.  Once these articles are in the computer it will be easier for people to find the person or event they are looking for.

This past week finally saw an end to the scrapbooks.  After weeks of removing photographs and documents from scrapbooks put together with construction paper and string, I was able to move on with the processing.  The newspaper articles were not going to last in the folders, so my next step was to photocopy them.  Once photocopied, I separated the documents from the photographs.  I numbered the folders in the boxes, and was able to move on to my next project.

My next project involves digitizing a collection of slides from John Creasy, a local artist. These photos include pictures of the effort to clean up Southwest Roanoke in the 1970s.  There are pictures that show people fixing houses that are in disrepair.   The other photos come from various places in the Roanoke Valley.  These other pictures include mountains, views of the city, and places like Smith Mountain Lake.  The process of scanning these pictures is very time consuming.  While scanning the photos, I am also taking an inventory of the pictures.  The purpose of this is that when putting the pictures into the database the descriptions in the inventory will match the scanned photograph in the computer.  Since I can only scan four slides at a time this will defiantly be a part of a project that will take a while.

Through my time working in the Virginia Room, I have become more aware that archival work may not be the most exciting thing, but it is still an important part of public history.  Organizing the documents and photographs, and when appropriate digitizing the material, is important when trying to preserve the history for future people to be able to use.

This week at the Virginia Room my ongoing project of transcribing oral histories has continued.  As I moved on to other histories, I was really able to see how diverse Roanoke was and still is today.  My first oral history was a struggle to say the least.  My second and third oral histories that I have completed this past week gave me very different dialects from my first oral history.  The challenge that this posed seemed to send me back to square one, yet I can also tell that my skills in transcribing are growing.  Likewise, these people have lived very different lives (two African American men and one white woman) and together they tell a broader story of Roanoke specifically during the civil rights movement and after.  A segregated Roanoke is not the story of the city that you usually hear, but I very real one for many.

 

After this I was back to the scrapbooks.  The issues I had last week were the similar to what I had this past week.  Since the actual book itself holds no historical importance and the adhesive only cause more damage to the documents and photos inside, I had to remove them from the scrapbook and what I could of the adhesive.  The adhesive ruins the documents because it eats away at the paper.  Between the adhesive and the now very fragile paper patients is the only thing that get them out of the scrapbook.  There are a few documents that are so faded from the damage of the adhesive that the best way to preserve them would be to scan them and put them into a database.  Eventually, the scrapbooks are put together using staples which is great for the documents.  Removing staples does not case the same kind of damage that adhesive does.

I enjoy getting to handle the materials personally, but I also see the advantages of taking this collection and digitizing them.  Since these scrapbooks begin not far from many people’s memories they may be able to find relatives or even themselves in the documents.  Digitizing this collection is particular good for people that cannot easily make it to the Virginia Room to view them first hand.  Having the material digitized also keeps them from becoming even more damaged.

The Virginia Room at the Roanoke Public Library is the archives for the City of Roanoke.  They collect not only items that pertain to the Roanoke Valley, but the whole state as well.  As an intern, I have a lot of options to see what it really means to work in an archive.

I have spent the past few weeks getting my hands into a few different projects.  For my first project I spent time mostly putting pictures into the digital database.  These pictures were from the Virginia Insurance Rating Bureau.  The pictures date back to 1949 of buildings owned by the city.  Most of the photos are of firehouses or the airport.  Some of these building looked familiar and others not so much. The process of getting these photos online is tedious to say the least.  Once these photos were in the database I was able to move onto the next project.

My next project was to begin transcribing oral histories.  This task is not only tedious, but also (to my surprise) really difficult.  The only oral histories that I have been able to complete these first few weeks have defiantly tested my knowledge of southern colloquialisms.  By doing this particular project I am also learning a lot about Roanoke.  Many of these histories are from people that lived in the northeast section of Roanoke.  The northeast was an African American majority, but now is mostly a parking lot.  Slow and steady is defiantly the way to go for this project.  Hopefully has I go forward these oral histories will become easier.

Giving my transcribing skills a break, I have started another project of deconstructing scrapbooks from the Raleigh Court Elementary School PTA.  There are scrapbooks from the 1960s through to the 1990s.  I am only in the beginning stages of this project, but I can’t wait to see where it takes me.

My final few weeks as an intern for the O. Winston Link Museum in downtown Roanoke has been very exciting, as I’ve gotten some experience working with a new program and project in a different place! I’ve been spending time at the History Museum of Western Virginia at Center in the Square in downtown Roanoke, which is about two blocks across the train tracks from the Link Museum. The purpose of the last few weeks here has been to utilize the PastPerfect archival program on their computer systems and tackle a separate project from my old cataloging and conditioning project, while still being able to work with O. Winston Link collections.

The new space I’m working at in Center in the Square is awesome. It’s located on the third floor of the building, and the exhibits have more variety, since it’s not as specific as the Link museum. I’m working within the museum’s library which looks directly out over the center of downtown Roanoke, which is filled with material covering a wealth of topics about the history of western Virginia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PastPerfect is a software application that streamlines the archival collection process into one organized digital database. It can be used for anything from photographic collections (what I’m working with), to various artifacts and historical documents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m working with the photographic collection on the history museum’s PastPerfect program, which has over 8,000 individual items within the database – the large majority of which are Link’s photos. The neat thing about Link’s photos within the PastPerfect program is that it covers his ‘N&W’ collection, which were his more well-known photographs of trains and railroads along the N&W line, but it also has a large amount of his commercial photographs as well. I’ve come across spreads with dozens of pictures for various commercial clients that range from ExxonMobil and their industrial facilities to a popular toothpaste marketed towards children.

Each photograph in the program has an accession number, which is how each one is organized and categorized. My main task has been to make sure that each photo has the correct accession number, and that there is consistency throughout, so that the collection is easy to navigate. Many of Link’s photos within the database haven’t been edited within the past 5 years, so a lot had to be updated with the correct number. Each photo also has three separate entry points where the accession number is used, so making sure that the number was consistent for each one was very important.

In my time as an intern, I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons about museum work, and specifically how important archival work is. Organizing and maintaining collections for museums is extremely essential, and a very delicate process. It can be frustrating sometimes, but there’s certainly a sense of accomplishment from making sure the archives, and in turn museum, are run smoothly.

In my last few weeks at the museum I have started a research project, helped with various mailings, and helped with various research tasks.

The project I am working on is the history of transportation in Salem and how it has affected the town.  As of now I have completed the bulk of my research and I will be working on this throughout the semester.  I believe that once I am finished it will either be included in the monthly newsletter or a on the Facebook page.

I also aided with filling the envelopes for the monthly newsletter.  Nothing too interesting but it is a vital part of keeping the museum running.  I have also aided with other various tasks regarding the mail.

The other research I completed was a general overview of any information about the Old Hinchee Country Store that was once located in Hanging Rock.  On a typical day at the museum I was given the task of finding any and all information on the store; a reporter from the paper wanted to do an article on the store.  I spent roughly an hour scrounging through the archives and I was able to find a little information that I was able to send on to the reporter.  I’m not really sure why the reporter did this but I also got a mention in the article itself!

While the last weeks of my time at the museum are coming to a close I am still trying to learn all that I can.  The previous three months have been a great learning experience that I will always remember fondly.

During my first days at SoFAB, I felt a little bit lost. I knew I needed to talk to people, but I just didn’t know any Jewish food scholars at the time. So, I turned to the National Council of Jewish Women. I sent a few emails, but they didn’t garner much response. I didn’t think too much of it—these women were busy.

But a few days ago, I received a random phone call from a private number. Much to my surprise, it was the president of the Greater New Orleans chapter. Before I had a chance to talk about my project, we were playing a dazzling round of Jewish geography. She asked if I knew anyone involved in the council, and I briefly mentioned that my aunt was an active member. Miss Gail almost couldn’t contain her excitement: “What’s her name?!” When I told her that my aunt was Nicole Stone, she nearly shrieked. “I was in your aunt’s wedding! Are you René or Lavalle’s daughter?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. After a few minutes of gossip, she invited me to lunch. And now the story really comes full circle. Here I am, trying to figure out how Jewish food traditions mix with Southern culture, and the answer has been right in front of me the entire time. So, in a few days, I’ll go meet Miss Gail at a nice New Orleans restaurant and we’ll talk about what it means to be Jewish and Southern. But most importantly, we’ll eat.

So, during this last week of my internship, I’m just wrapping things up. Tomorrow I’ll hand over a flash drive loaded with exhibit plans, article summaries, and artifact captions, and my job will be done. But in reality, this project will never end. Every time I look through my grandmother’s recipe book or make my father’s gumbo or eat my weight in charoset, I’m adding to the history of Southern Jewish foodways. It’s powerful stuff, and I’m proud to be a part of it.