Up to my ears in Interns!

Egads! Another post in May? Its a miracle!

Actually the real miracle is that I now have four interns under me at the museum. Can you believe it!!! 4 interns and they're all from Berry college! I'm practically jumping with joy! I don't know what I'm going to have them all do.

Amanda and Jessica have been working beautifully and we now have almost all of the artifact boxes on the 2nd floor completed. (I've only just started on the archive boxes, the library, and I'm still trying to clean the same artifacts I was cleaning two or three weeks ago. More on all that later.) They both work really fast together. Hunter, I actually interviewed for his Internship and just found out today that he'll be joining us this week! Though he won't be there on a day I am. Ellen started last Friday but because of work at the Library I couldn't make it down to Cherokee to meet her. I meet her tomorrow though, which is pretty exciting.

Things are really starting to hop at the museum. I think tomorrow both Amanda and Jessica will be ready to start on the jumble that's upstairs. We're going to clear away a corner for shelving, put artifacts away into boxes, and generally sort the whole mess so that it can be walked through. Of course, Ellen and Hunter will be working on the same task for right now. Especially because both Amanda and Jessica are currently working on exhibits.

Amanda expressed an interest in making a weaving/ cloth making/ washing/ using exhibit. I'm not totally sure what its shaped up to be yet but I'll find out tomorrow when I get her list. I'm pushing her a little fast with this exhibit because she should be leaving us at the end of June. (If I remember correctly. I really need to write all this down.)

Jessica wrote up a lovely list for me of several ideas she had for the museum, including a railroad exhibit. So we're going to let her get a start on that. Tomorrow I'll go downstairs with her and we'll discuss where she wants to put it. Then she'll be making me a list of the items she wants to put into it and making a design plan.

In the meantime, I have to work on my exhibit, for which I have yet to create a design plan. I'm going to try measuring out the exhibit cases I'll need. On top of that, we're preparing for the air-conditioning which might take months to get put it. That means I have to go through the books in our "library" which is currently the wall hiding the staff kitchen and workspace. All of the books I'm going through are ones that were donated to the library. I've been looking through them to evaluate whether they're useful or from prominent people or places in the community. For example we found a book from a town that doesn't exist anymore and told us about the history of clothing up to the 1920s. So it was a double keeper. Some of the books that were donated have been damaged in the past (water damage, pest damage, and so on.) So unfortunately we have to put those in a de-accession pile. And of course, a few aren't about Cherokee, the museum, nearby, or aren't historic resources. For example, the many college text books we have from the sixties. I had three copies of one on home-ec cooking. So those we're going to put in the de-accession pile as well.

I've also started working on the archives upstairs. This last week I found a real treasure. There's a picture of the courthouse that was burned down with the Coosa River News building in the 1880s. We have a copy of a picture from a tintype, but its not really very clear. I found the aniversary newspaper from the Coosa River News celebrating 50 years of reporting - also known as the year of 1928. The paper is not in the best shape but I managed to open it, relatively safely. There right in the middle of the section I was holding was the clearest picture of that tintype that we had ever seen. Get this. In the picture there are two or three people standing around the Coosa River News building. In ours you couldn't even tell there was a single person. And we now know that there was some kind of pavilion in front of the courthouse which could have been just about anything. Though I personally think its a telephone station type thing.  The director was really happy with me. Especially because in other sections of that paper we found different pictures which he had never seen before. Score me!

So we've started cleaning some artifacts that are downstairs because they're pretty rusty. (We're only working on the metal ones currently.) I got it started but I haven't been able to complete the first batch. Basically we rub off the rust, apply a baking soda and water paste, and then scrub that off. It works really well. We even got one of the items so clean you can see the maker's mark clearly now. Though its been eaten away a bit by the rust so its only possible to read that the company was placed in Rockford, IL. I'm hoping to get back onto that project but I've been stopped by working on my exhibit. Which tomorrow my lovely F block should be all cleared away. Yay!

Its a little hard switching from library mind to museum mind. I wish I could make it out there more than twice a week (at most.) However, all my interns are incredibly smart and hopefully resourceful so we shouldn't have to much of a problem getting this place into shape. Here's to having all of the artifacts in the system by the middle of August! With four other people helping, I don't see how we can't.

Second floor shaping up!/ 15,043 and starting to shrink.

Where did April go?

What?! I completely missed posting anything in April! Can you tell I've been busy? Well I have some exciting news for everyone reading this. I've been promoted!

If you can call it that. Its still an unpaid position, but I am now the official curator for the museum! Yay! I think. Its actually a little scary because, I don't have very much training. Everything I'm learning is from reading things, Tilden - the godsend - and grasping at things I've picked up over the various volunteer jobs I've done.

All in all though the museum is looking really good. I mentioned last time that we got permission to do Leesburg's exhibit, and a lovely $500 to supply us with necessary furnishings. Well, the director already had the space and now we're just waiting on Leesburg to give us the artifacts. It actually looks really good, we did sliding glass doors on this exhibit because the space next to it will be for the West Point stuff. (Which the loaner wants to remove occasionally so he can tour it around.)

Tomorrow I should have my first intern appearing, at the moment we have three. Jessica, Ellen, and Amanda. Amanda should show up tomorrow, and since I can't, she'll be familiarizing herself with Past Perfect. So that's some of whats been happening in the museum. Now I'm going to catch up on what I've been doing!

Cleaning, designing exhibits, working on getting computers up, and trying to figure out the basement. Oh which reminds me, I have to redo the basement map because we have one more partition space that I thought we would.

Now when I say cleaning, I don't mean just any old cleaning. I've been removing rust from some of our metal objects around the museum. This means scrubbing the artifact, putting a baking soda/water paste on them and letting it dry, and then scrubbing it again. Actually its turning out really well. I've started on the Blacksmith shop because its a prominent exhibit, and I wanna make some of those tools shine if possible. Unfortunately I just found out that on some of the wood artifacts, like the plow pieces, there is mold growing, which is actually pretty dangerous for our visitors, and us. (Its never good to breath in mold.) So I'm going to have to look into a sealant to seal off moisture from our wood artifacts.

If you wanna know why there is moisture, well, its a basement and they can get cold and damp. It happens. Anyway, the metal artifacts are starting to look pretty good, the four or five I've done, on a couple of them, I've actually unearthed maker's marks! Yay! And with, more cleaning, I think I can get a few of them to shine. So that will just make the blacksmith's shop an even more fantastic exhibit. The important thing is to remove the rust so that the artifacts stay clean and look like they actually would in the time period they were made.

So we recently received two computers from a local bank. We got one of them running, and then had to figure out how to hook it up to the printer. But the other one is just giving us all sorts of problems. At first it wouldn't read the Operating System Disk because it didn't have a DVD reader. Now it simply won't load it, it gets to a certain point and then sticks and won't budge any further. We're a bit worried its broken and may be unusable.

The other two things I'm doing are pretty simple. The basement, I mentioned, is all messed up from the partitions, so my lists don't actually have the objects in the right places. (Not that it matters since we'll all be moving them around eventually anyway but...) As for my exhibit, the director is supposed to get some people to move stuff out of the F block and then I can start figuring out exactly how I'm going to set up the exhibit. I have to talk with him about lighting still, because the lighting in the basement isn't the best, but we'll see how it goes!

First floor almost completely done/15,053 and growing.