After my two weeks of army fun in the sun in Virginia, I returned for the final week of my internship. The week started as usual with housekeeping on Tuesday. That completed, we set up a photo area to take pictures of firearms for my exhibit. Photographing the pistols was easy enough, but photographing muskets and fowlers turned out to be much more difficult. We had to set up a much longer roll of paper for the background, and in order to get far enough away to have the entire weapon in my shot I had to use a ladder and take pictures from above.
Pictures taken, I proceeded to edit them, which mostly consisted of cropping them. I continued that for the rest of the day. Wednesday began with some additional editing to my core labels, and then writing my caption labels. Before I finished those, we went to get a musket out of the exhibit case for a picture. This proved to be much more difficult than it should have been, as we had to dismantle a large portion of the case to get it open. Ideally, exhibit cases should be designed for secure yet easy access to the objects. That way, objects can be rotated, exhibits can be kept fresh, and no one has trouble getting to them. This case was designed in the 1970s however, and needs improvement in various areas. Once finished with this, I returned to writing captions and editing my photos. Ideally, I’d like to edit out the background and musket stands and turn it into a transparent layer, but unfortunately that process takes a lot of time. Once done with that, I began uploading the weapons to Omeka, which is a fairly simple and repetitive process. Thursday was my final day. We started by going to the Muhlenberg Brigade huts to do some training with the interpreters on what was in the exhibits to help them provide better interpretation. After this, I continued work on Omeka, which mostly consisted of copy-pasting my already written labels into exhibit builder and then fighting with the web layout until I had it the way I wanted. Once my exhibit was up and ready on my website, I went into the park's Omeka sites to sort out the previous exhibits and upload mine. However, I discovered the park had two separate Omeka sites as well as a site called Atavist. While I was able to do an Omeka API import to get my content into one of Valley Forge's Omeka sites, I could not transfer my theme over and ran out of time to sort out consolidating the rest of the park's web content. I will be back at the park as a volunteer to fire the cannon again and to help sort out the web mess I found. Total hours I spent at the park for this internship: 141.25
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This week started with a trolley tour of the park. The trolley tours are run by a private organization in cooperation with the park, so the tour guide is not a park ranger. However, at each stop where park rangers are, the guide is not allowed to provide interpretation, and the rangers provide it instead. This means the park still retains some control of the content.
While each tour guide is different, the guide whose tour I was on gave a remarkably up-to-date and nuanced history of the park. For example, included in his tour were remarks about public memory and memorialization, just not in academic lingo. After the tour, I continued work on my exhibit. I began drafting long, academic versions of my labels for later conversion to short, readable labels. I also considered how I was going to organize my exhibit. That done, I started the process of converting them from paragraphs into short labels, deciding to stick with a 50 word limit. As always, this was a challenging process of elimination and clarification. On Wednesday, I focused on helping complete the annual inventory. Items worth more than a certain value are considered controlled property and need to be inventoried every year, while other items are selected for inventory randomly every year (the idea being eventually all items will be accounted for). Since most of the high-value items are weapons, this is where we spent most of our time (which makes me perfectly happy). However, we did run into some difficulty finding some objects. Fortunately, I knew from before that two of the firearms were in a different cabinet than the one listed, so we could find those right away. On the other hand, some of the letters and books we had to find were also in a different place than they were listed, and it took us longer to find them. We also came across two wall guns which were called muskets in the catalog. When they were cataloged initially, the NPS did not have wall gun in its nomenclature book. We checked to see if it was in the updated nomenclature, and sure enough it was and we were able to update it in the record. The point of all this is that collections work is never done, as things can always be updated and refined. I did not work Thursday this week, as I had to leave for annual training. |
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