Week of 6/14-6/18 Internship blog

It has been another great week at the Heritage Foundation. As mentioned last week, I finished the captions for the movie theater exhibit and submitted them to my supervisor. As such, almost all of my effort this week has been focused on Winter Garden at Work. My progress in that exhibit is now just about on par with the theater exhibit. 

When doing research I have used multiple tools at my disposal at the foundation. Firstly, there is the archive. There is quite a wealth of knowledge located in the archive in the form of objects, books, newspaper clippings, and photos, among other things. Everything is labeled and organized. For instance, there are filing cabinets with material about families. If one wanted to find information about someone with the name "McCoy" they would find the cabinet labeled "Family Files - L-Mc" and inside they would find file folders alphabetized according to family name. The McCoy folder would contain photos that are confirmed to be of someone in the McCoy family as well as newspaper clippings, documents, or other writings that mention the family or a member of it. There are cabinets for businesses, churches, families, citrus, and more. In the filing cabinets I have found good factual information in things like legal or fiscal documents, while newspaper clippings have been a good source for the type of stories that are great to tell in a setting such as the Heritage Museum.

To browse through archived photos and objects, rather than manually going through each one, I use database software called PastPerfect. I briefly mentioned this program in my first blog, but I did not really explain it. One can search according to description, which is similar to searching on the internet, or one could search according to object number, type of item, and more. Almost all of the photos and objects have been catalogued in the database and so it has been very useful in my work.

Next week, I am looking forward to finishing up the captions for Winter Garden at Work, and then I will finalize the curation of objects for both exhibits and plan out the layout.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week of 7/19-7/23 Internship blog

This week I spent a majority of my time accessioning new collections into the archive. There were two large donations to the foundation containing objects from two prominent members of the community. The collections mostly consisted of personal correspondence and programs for events. For both collections I separated each document or object into categories, then listed the items in said categories into our archival software. If there was more than one copy of an item, the copy in better condition was accessioned into our collection while the other was set aside to be donated to another archive. One of the documents was a letter from Richard Nixon, with his actual signature, which I found exciting. Once each item was listed on the computer the subsections of the collection were put into folders which were placed in a box along with objects from the collection and placed on a shelf in the archive according to its ID. Also, In Winter Garden there is a children’s scavenger hunt run by th
Read more

Week of 6/07-6/11 Internship blog

I have completed another productive week at the foundation. Of my two projects, the movie theater project is farther along than Winter Garden at Work. This week I focused a lot on the theater exhibit, and finished the first draft of the captions, which encompasses most of the text. I have already picked out what I believe are the best pictures for the exhibit, but of course that can change. At this point I must continue to curate objects and decide which will be put into the exhibit. There are some obvious inclusions, such as some chairs that were used in the old Winter Garden Theatre and movie posters. Admittedly, progress has been slower on Winter Garden at Work. The topic is more broad than the movie theater exhibit and so I have to look through more files to find information. In my research I have hit a couple of bumps. The first is that when I am using secondary sources the authors that wrote the histories (at least the ones that I have found so far in the archive) tend to neglect
Read more

Week of 7/12-7/16 Internship blog

Well, it is now over halfway through July, and we are entering the last few weeks of my internship. We have spent this week getting ready to put up the Winter Garden at the Movies exhibit. We have gotten all the items that we might use out of the archive. We still need to decide which movie posters to use, as there are quite a few archived, but most of them are distasteful in one way or another so we have narrowed it down to a couple of different ones. All that is left is to get signs and images printed, and to set it all up. It is a scary thought that the exhibit will soon be displayed to the public, but also exciting. I have put a lot of thought and work into it and so I will be glad to see it finished.  In addition, this Friday my supervisor took me on a tour of the area. Up until that point I had only known important places in West Orange County from what I had read or seen in the archive. It was fun and interesting to see in person all that I had written about. We e
Read more