Week 2:
African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa

June 1, 2013

Week two at the museum was cut a bit short. Monday was Memorial Day and Friday because of flood warnings, I was told to stay home. So in this short week, I took far more photos to give everyone an idea of what the museum is like. Those are found at the end of this post. Until then, here’s what I did:

• Started another big project! Work on the Virgil Powell materials. Powell was the first African American police detective in Iowa, as well as an impetus in finger printing in Iowa. Tuesday I digitized over 900 photos and documents that have been donated to the museum from his life.
• Wednesday I divided my time between continuing working on Powell’s materials by beginning to archive all of the newly digitized items and editing other museum materials.
• Thursday I continued to start to store Powell’s items and returned to working on the oral histories. I finished uploading all the material, and started weeding out the corrupt files so that I can bring down the mater copies of the histories and attempt to get everything in working order. Unfortunately because of flood warnings, this means the museum also went into lock down mode and we moved everything that was up to 6 feet from the ground higher, into the loft and the upper level of the museum to save them if the flooding was going to be as damaging as the flood of 2008.

Holdings room, where I spend most of my time.

A little bit of Cornell history. Claire Solak made this during her time at the museum.