Week 6:
Giant Suction Cups and Organizing

July 8, 2021

Flood Waters

Most of the week in person was spent organizing the museum’s institutional archive. It has been a pretty messy system of the museum’s history since 1993. It was not too bad since I enjoy these types of organizational projects. It was definitely made more difficult that everything before 2008 had been damaged from the 2008 flood in Cedar Rapids. The museum’s collections room had experienced pretty bad flooding, so many of the museum’s historical items have been damaged from the water. In any case, this was how most of my time was spent. It was fascinating to read and see all these documents about the creation of the museum. It definitely helped to understand just how important the museum is to Cedar Rapids and many of the residents. 

Jesse Owens

Perhaps most exciting this week was the fact that I finally got to install the Jesse Owens display case that I have been working on since I started at the museum. A lot of work went into this project, so it felt great to finally have a finished product with my name on it. With the other research I am doing, I feel a little bummed that I will not be able to help and create the final exhibit. Regardless, I am glad to see this cumulation of my effort. While I was at the museum, we also continued to stretch out the banner that we started last week, and it is already looking so much better. This will definitely be an amazing piece of history for the museum to add to its collection.

Lots of Learning

The rest of the week was spent, as usual, doing research for the upcoming exhibit and transcribing an oral history. I have realized that I do not really imagine this to be a great career for me. While I love learning about history, I find a lot of this work pretty isolating. Granted, if it were not for the pandemic, I would be doing more things like tours and teaching the Summer History Adventures to kids. Even in the collections field, though, it is a lot of independent work regardless of the pandemic. What I have realized is that I need more human interaction in a career for myself. Of course, that is, in part, what the goal of the internship was for. I am still learning and getting a lot out of it, even if this might not be for me in the future.