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.
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