Week 7:
Beetlejuice!

July 31, 2016

This week was a lag week of wrapping projects up and cleaning the workspace before construction and installation of the temporary exhibit starts next week. It started a little gross with the discovery of unwelcome guests, and finished with a lot of excitement!

After the completion of some editing on Monday afternoon, I remembered that Brianna had said the collections room really needed to be swept, but she didn’t have time. Being an intern and a person who actually enjoys sweeping, I offered to do the job for her. I started in aisle 1 of the artifacts shelves. About 5 minutes in, I swept out the body of a beetle. The presence of any bugs in a collections room is not ideal, but there are some that are harmless like spiders or rolly poly’s since they don’t eat fabrics. Beetles, however, are more alarming. Brianna and I spent a lot of time googling and came to the conclusion that it was a harmless cedar beetle.

The next morning I returned to sweeping since I did not get any farther than the second shelf the night before. Unfortunately I found more beetles. This meant it was time for Brianna to get concerned, and consider calling their pest control guy. She had never seen the beetles before and more than five classified an infestation. I ended up sweeping them up from all over the collections room. Right before Brianna was going to make a call, I noticed there were a lot in the sticky traps by the doors that lead to the outside dock. I also found much bigger beetles in those traps that looked more like carpet beetles, which are extremely dangerous to museums. We figured out that the source of the mysterious bugs were some old non-artifact exhibit stuff that had been brought in before going to a new storage unit. The stuff was not cleaned before it was brought to the dock. When Brianna and I stepped into the dock, the floor was littered with the beetle bodies. She had the objects removed immediately.

With all of that beetle excitement done and over with, I got to work boxing all of the radio equipment artifacts I had cataloged the week before. Boxing involves finding an archive safe box, lining it with tissue and then surrounding the object with tissue. I did have to make trays from a synthetic material for some of the bigger objects. It was hard to do, and my second one definitely looked better than the first, even if I was a little off in the measurements.

Alyssa and I are slowly working on inventorying the massive magazine collection the museum has. There are over a thousand magazines sitting in collections, but there is no record of what they are. A lot of them are African American publications like Ebony and Jet. For some of them, it isn’t as obvious why we have them. The process involves one of us sitting on the big ladder and yelling down the title, date, volume and issue to the other person who enters the information into an excel spreadsheet. We’ve been doing this project for the whole 3 hours Alyssa is there in the afternoons (though not everyday), and we’ve still only gotten through a little over 20 boxes. But we figure if we put a good dent into it, it will be easier for others to complete later.

The most exciting time of the week was on Friday. Brianna told me it was time to install the little lobby case exhibit I had curated a couple of weeks before. I had researched African Americans in the Olympics, and had picked out relevant artifacts from the collection. So on Friday morning, I printed out the panel and labels I wrote, and transferred them to card stock. I pulled all of the artifacts I had selected, and prepared them for display. It was really exciting to put my name as the curator in the computer. When Alyssa arrived that afternoon, we opened the case, removed the previous exhibit artifacts and put mine in. Brianna gave me full direction on where things should be, and how to show the labels. So though it’s small, I have officially curated my first exhibit!

With everything that happened this week, I can’t wait until we start on the biggest project of all next week!