Week 6:
Always Learning

July 24, 2016

Week six has flown by, and I find myself reeling from all the new things I have learned. When I was given the chance to have this experience, learning new things was the number one goal for me. I wanted to improve myself and expand my horizons and this week I accomplished that.

The week started with finishing up box two of Virgil Powell’s photographs. There are still eight boxes, but Brianna knows there’s no way I can get all eight boxes done in the time I have left. So, when I finished the second box she had me move on. Much to my surprise she asked me to make a movie — kind of. She asked me to watch Within Our Gates which is a 1920 silent film made by African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. It was made in response to D.W. Griffith’s incredibly racist film The Birth of a Nation. Micheaux’s film was by African Americans, starring African Americans, and for African Americans. I actually saw Within Our Gates earlier this year in Professor Stewart’s African Americans in Film class. When it was first released it was very controversial because it included lynching scenes.

What Brianna wanted me to do was watch it and pick out 3 to 6 important parts that were no longer than 5 minutes long. A TV will be set up in the exhibit that will play the scenes. The scenes I picked did include the lynchings, as they are essential to the purpose of the film. I also picked scenes that proved stereotypes wrong, which brought me to the limit of six scenes. Then Brianna asked me to extract these scenes from the movie and put them together in a movie making software. This completely floored me. I am in no way a tech oriented person, so I knew this was going to be a challenge.

Brianna showed me how to extract the scenes using Windows Movie Maker, which basically just involved “splitting” the scene from the rest of the movie and then saving it. She also asked me to insert a “credits” panel that explained what was happening in that particular scene so that viewers knew what was going on. For some reason, I thought that would be it. I was wrong. After I extracted the scenes I had to put them into a movie making software. The software I used was just purchased by the museum, so Brianna hadn’t even used it yet. After watching a lot of YouTube tutorial videos, I gave it a shot. The trick was to set up the scenes on a menu, so that visitors can select which scene they want to watch. That part ended up being not so hard, but linking the end of the film back to the menu instead of each scene playing all the way through was hard. It took all day, but I figured it out and now it’s ready for display!

Though I have cataloged countless photographs and books, Brianna realized that I had not yet cataloged any actual artifacts. Learning how to do this was not hard, as the process is similar to the photographs, just with a few other steps. I was given a collection the museum received in 2014 to put into the system. The objects came from an African American radio station in Des Moines that was established in the 1980s and was disbanded in 2000. As already established, I’m not a tech person. So I have very little clue about what all the equipment is. Or what it does. Or how it works. Google has really been an asset this last week. The biggest new thing with cataloging objects is taking photographs of the object and uploading them.

All of this learning has been broken up by small projects. More and more panels are coming in from the designer for review. There have been some formatting issues, so there has been a lot of editing to do. I’m also still working on making object tags for all the textiles. I’m really close to being done with that though. And on Friday, Brianna and I went furniture scouting at nearby consignment stores for the reading nooks. It was fun to get out of the museum for a while and see more of downtown Cedar Rapids than I ever have before. And, by helping Brianna with the furniture I’m learning a lot more about the budget side of things than I think I would have normally!