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. 