More scanning photos today! It may seem like I’ve been doing this a while, but I’m almost two-thirds done with the collection I’m working on! Currently, I’ve scanned a total of 87 photos in this collection. I’m not sure how many I’ll have done once I’m finished, so I’m going to guess around 120. We’ll see if that guess holds any water later in the week!
I’ve gotten through the Classic Car Show photographs, and I’m nearing the end of the Easter Service group too. That’s almost two of three folders done! I’m not sure what’s in the third folder, but I’m very excited to see. It’s incredibly important to be scanning and digitizing these photos in case we lose the originals. It’s not likely to happen, but it's better to be safe than sorry and to have things and not need them rather than need them and not have them.
Still more photo scanning today! I’ve made it to the last folder of the collection, so I’m almost done scanning those photos! My total is now up to 125, which is definitely more than I expected.
But one thing I came to realize today is that this internship is teaching me a special skill; one that you can’t learn in school or from a book. That skill is reading other people’s handwriting. Today, I had a photograph with something written on the back of it. It was a little hard to make out, but I knew it had to be a last name, because the word before it was ‘Joyce’. After some sleuthing and a second opinion from another intern, I finally figured out the last name. I won’t put it here to protect that person’s privacy, but it was a tricky one for sure.
I was about to just put the words and first name down as a caption, but being able to decipher those names actually gave me even more information to work with in the catalog. So now we know who the person in the photograph is. The best part of it is that now that it’s in the catalog, anyone and everyone who reads it will know that name too and not have to try and figure it out for themselves, like I did.
Yet more photo scanning was on the docket today. I’ve made it to the last half of the folder, and then I’ll be done with the collection! My total is now up to 160. I feel a little silly now for making that 120 photos guess on Tuesday, but it is what it is.
Today I found a very nice use for some very niche knowledge (at least to my generation). As I was scanning photos, I came across a photograph where a woman was carrying something. At first I couldn’t tell what it was. I thought it was a toy of some kind.
Can you tell what this is?
But, then I saw the different colored parts and I remembered something! My dad’s side of the family just so happens to have that exact same object, and even better yet, it’s in his house. It’s not a toy, although I was certainly fooled at first; rather, it’s a light projector. How it works is that the disc spins and a light will shine through it which causes the light to become colored and change as the disc spins! Even more niche fact about it: it was often bought for aluminum Christmas trees that were very popular in the 50s and up until the mid 60s. Unfortunately, there is no aluminum christmas tree to be found in the photo, but it is still a very cool find.
The morning of today was mainly more photo scanning, with my count now up to 183, and it’s very much looking like I’ll go over 200 on Tuesday.
As I was scanning, the curator was going through an accessions shelf, and she found some very old vinyl records. They were super thick, and unfortunately worse for wear. But a part of me still wonders what the music on it would have sounded like. They were well over a hundred years old, and recorded by one of the first Black police officers and detectives in Iowa history. Unfortunately, I never caught his name, but he was a renaissance man to be sure! Not only was he a photographer, taking photos of crime scenes, but he also tested film for the Eastman Kodak Company. He would often take photographs during his trips and vacations and make his neighbors watch the slide reel he would assemble of the photos he took.
In the afternoon, it was back on front desk duty!
The first thing visitors see when they come in is the front desk!
Unfortunately, it was a very slow day in terms of patrons, with only one group of visitors coming in. But there were other things happening today that were very exciting! A local church was setting up for an event called Gospel-Fest in the AAMI’s event room. The music that they were playing as they set up was beautiful, and it gave me my first real taste of Black Gospel music. I’m definitely going to be looking more into that in the future, both for the history and for more good music for myself.
So far, my internship has got me really excited about a possible career in museum work. I would absolutely love to help manage a collection like I’m doing now. It’s a lot of fun, and you learn so much while you’re doing it. I’m not exactly getting big-picture Black history like I thought I would be, but I’m learning something even better: small histories.
What do I mean by small histories? A better term for it might be local histories or hidden histories. But what I mean is that there are a lot of stories that one wouldn’t learn in a textbook or a general overview of Black American history. But these stories that are often buried by time are just as important and as inspiring as big stories and events that we have heard about time and time again.