I finally finished scanning the photo collection today! My guess of 120 last week turned out to be very off, as the collection had 209 photographs.
The collection I scanned had over 200 photos!
But now that I have that done, I’m moving on to learn how to catalog objects, which is a bit harder. It’s a lot like cataloging photographs, but there’s much more camera work involved since I’m going to be working in three dimensions rather than two. I’m struggling a little with the camera work, but I’m hoping to get it down more tomorrow.
Like any job, museum and collections work has its hard parts, and for me right now, that’s photography. But I’m sure that with some time and practice, I’ll be doing just fine! I’ve faced similar problems before during my time at Cornell College, whether it be mastering a new citation style or grappling with big concepts. But what I’ve learned through those experiences is that things go best when you break them down into smaller pieces.
Firstly, I finally got a handle on taking photos! As much as I would like to say that I’ve mastered the art of archival photography, I haven’t. There’s a lot I can still work on, like detail shots, but I’m so happy to have gotten the basics down!
Today I moved on to the biggest challenge in the archive: the Wynn Papers. There are at least 10 moving boxes full of papers, files, objects, and other things that are sitting in the archive to be processed, and today we started processing them! The curator picked through everything and took out everything that could be classified as an object, leaving only archival stuff for me to sort through and box. Even with that, though, I filled nearly three archive boxes with the stuff from a singular moving box! This will definitely take a while, and I don’t think I’ll be able to get all this done before my internship is over. But it’s so much fun to get to work on big projects like these, since it gives me several puzzles to solve.
This is an archive box!
The first puzzle is probably the most obvious: what’s in the papers? The museum got these papers from a person’s estate, and someone was kind enough to put them into general groups, but it’s our job to go deeper and group things together that are related by topic or place.
The second puzzle is a bit trickier: the actual sorting. Normally, we group papers in folders by topic and year (for example, “ __’s Birthday at Home Depot, 1985” or “So-and-So Convention NYC, 2014”). But with so much to go through, that takes a while! It’s also not uncommon for me to have to re-group papers or re-name files if more than one topic, or sometimes even place, comes up. For example, I can’t put things like book reviews in the same folder as something involving library loans, even if they both come from the same library. Similarly, I can’t put files from Place-town Library in the same folder as ones from Nowhere-ville Library, even though they’re both library materials.
The third puzzle is more physical: where can I put all these folders? Archive boxes are only so big, and can only hold so much paper, so finding room for everything is super important! While it’s definitely not uncommon for collections to have more than one box, one of my jobs is to group folders into those boxes, usually by year and topic (“Place-ville Library, 1963-2021”, for example), to make a cohesive record. Order is important!
I’m so excited to be helping with this! I’m having so much fun sorting, and I’m learning a lot as I go! I really think that the more I do this, the more I’m realizing just how much I love collections work.
Today, I actually didn’t spend much time in the collections room. Rather than sorting through the Wynn papers, I accompanied the curator to the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. They will be short on tour guides this summer, and since I want to experience every part of working at a museum, I volunteered to help cover some tours. The Veterans Memorial Building is probably most well known for its stained glass window, designed by Grant Wood in the 1920s.
What’s even cooler is that they are their own self-contained museum! I got to visit their World War II exhibit, where I saw a real working radio from the ‘40s! The exhibit was top-notch and was like nothing I’d ever seen before in a museum, let alone a veterans museum.
A real 1940s radio! It still works!
But after the curator and I returned to the AAMI, it was back to sorting through papers. As I’m trying to piece together a cohesive story based on the papers I’m sorting through, it really made me think about the impact a single person can have on the world around them.
In the morning today, I sorted more of the Wynn papers, and I’ve been making slow progress! It’s a lot to get through, even in the smaller boxes, but it’s still super fun.
Progress as of 6/13. All of this was filled with moving boxes when we first got it!
As usual, I worked at the front desk in the afternoon. Did you know that Juneteenth is coming up? On June 19th, we celebrate the emancipation of Black people. Because of that, other places were coming to us to pick up travelling exhibits all about Black history. It’s really encouraging to see that not just museums, but libraries and even prisons care about this important day.