Hi everybody!
So here is a really really late post. There are two reasons I haven't really been writing. Firstly, now that I have a job, I've been far too busy. Secondly, not much happened at the museum until last week. So here are the things I'll talk about today. Autographed Player Piano Roll, Partition, West Point, TAG Picture, Leesburg, Ashley 5, Reel to Reel Player, and Interns.
Now, when I went into the museum Tuesday the 20th I didn't think that I would spend 30 minutes trying to unroll a player piano roll. In fact when I went in, I didn't even know we'd recieved a batch of player piano rolls. Which, side note, the best one out of the bunch was Down at the Old Water Mill which is a fantastic foxtrot with a lovely catchy beat and tune to it.
Actually I have to first backtrack to Ashley 5, as the director calls her. Ashley 5 was a young woman who was waiting for a job to open up with the State and so they placed her at the museum for a month. The director, who knew I needed help, handed her over to me. I made up a sheet so that she could inventory and measure everything in the bottom shelves of the East Wall and in the Basement. She was a very quick worker, by the end of the month she had both done which would have taken me about 4 months to finish measuring. Thanks to her, I now have all the bottom east wall shelves in the system.
Okay so back to what led up to the player piano roll. While putting in some of the items from her list into the system, I discovered that a whole group from the same donator were not in the system at all. So instead of wasting 30 minuts writing the list down, I made a form so that each new item could be put in and I'd know the date of accession. The director asked me what I was doing and when I showed him the sheet he recieved a great idea. He could use the sheets to mark down all of the new stuff that enter the museum when I'm not there. Then I'd know what new stuff I'd have to add when I'm done inventorying everything else. I really wish we'd thought this up before.
Then he told me, oh yeah. We could use this for those player piano rolls that were donated yesterday and the baby clothes. We weren't sure how good the piano rolls were so he had me go through them. Unfortunately a few of them were moldy, so we had to get rid of those. But a good amount of them were good and still playable. I showed the director the ones I thought we should save and he agreed. I was holding the Under the Double Eagle roll when the director looked into the bottom of the box. It said, Autographed Player Piano Roll. We were like really? I looked to see who wrote the music and was excited. The roll was potentially autographed by Josef Wagner! Wagner! I was so excited, I unrolled the whole thing to see if the autograph was there. Sure enough at the very end of the roll there was his signature. Unfortunately, the rolls is only worth about 5 dollars according to the internet. Since I didn't actually find a Wagner roll, I'm going to try and persuade the director to get it appraised.
The next day I went into the museum was Friday of that week. The director was really excited because a celebration for a student from the area, who was admitted into West Point went really well and ended in a donation of all of the West Point stuff to the museum. It's fantastic because it really added to the exhibit that the director already wanted to do with West Point. (Cherokee county has a long history of West Point graduates.)
That same day, while I was putting stuff into the system, the Mayor of Leesburg came in. The director, after talking with him, told me that Leesburg was one of two towns who he had yet to get to agree to putting an exhibit about the town in the museum. Leesburg voted last week and they're going to give us $500 to put together an exhibit.
Which brings me to my interns, because they'll be helping with it. We have at least two interns from Barry College that will be coming into Cherokee this summer and will be studying under me. Can you believe it? Not only that but there might even be a third student. Anyway, they'll be learning about Past Perfect, how to design and put together exhibits, and various other things about working in a museum. It'll be a lot of fun. One of the girls is really excited and already told the director that she wants to start in May. So in a little over a month, I'll have an intern helping me out. This is doubly great because it frees up some space for me to think about my own exhibit.
Most everything else has a small mention so let me wrap this up. This Tuesday, the director took me down to the basement and showed me what the builders had put up last week. We now have our basement partitioned off into sections so that we can easily build a different exhibit in each, saving one for storage. Also, for my exhibit, I found out that one of our Reel to Reel players had a reel in it. I'm going to ask my dad to help me try to fix it, because well, I want to play the reel. We changed the batteries but nothing happened, if only it'd been that simple. Also on Tuesday, a man kindly brought in a picture of the TAG railroad from around lookout mountain. Though the picture is modern, looked up the artist, its still a great picture for our collection. I really wanna do a TAG exhibit someday.
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