Learning About Museum Operations at the Ponce de Leon Lighthouse and Museum

      Good afternoon everyone! This week at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse and Museum, I continued to work on the museum's collection management, working to make sure that the museum's large collection has been properly catalogued and organized. However, I also go to briefly work with the museum's curator, Felipe, as we worked on methods for cleaning the various outdoor signs around the lighthouse's property.     On Monday, my day was spent the same way my previous couple of weeks had been. I arrived early to the lighthouse that morning and immediately got to work on the large list of items in the museum's collection that still need to be accessioned. At this point, most of the largest and most important items have been properly accessioned and organized within PastPerfect, but this means that much of what  remains are smaller items and duplicate items, most of which will probably remain either in storage or will be moved into the Pacetti Hotel's "Visible Stora

      Good evening everybody! This week, I will admit, was a rather slow and simple week of working as an intern with the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse. Because of Hurricane Milton, many of the plans the museum's curator, Felipe, put in place did not come to fruition. Originally, Felipe had planned to be gone this week for the Florida Association of Museums' annual conference. This is supposed to be a conference where different people in or interested in the world of museums can come together to share and discuss ideas and experiences about museum design, museum operations, collections management and a host of other related topics. During the conference this  year, Felipe was scheduled to be at the conference for multiple days to give presentations on the restoration of the Pacetti Hotel and the complications of deaccessioning items from a collection. During this time, Felipe had planned for Holly and myself to remain on our own within PastPerfect, taking the time that Felipe

       Good evening, everybody! I hope everyone was safe during the impact of Hurricane Milton this week. It is because of the hurricane that I was only able to intern with the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse for Monday of this week since the rest of the week was spent prepping for the storm. However, the storm did provide me with a unique learning opportunity as I got to get a look at how a museum prepares its property and collection in case of major weather events such as hurricanes.     When I arrived at the lighthouse on the morning of October 7th, everybody had been anticipating the storm that was predicting to arrive later that week. This meant that for the time being the normal duties of the interns was put on hold as Felipe, our supervisor, had us going through the files of the museum's safety guidelines to find the binder on hurricane preparation. Once we found that, we took stock of all the museum's supply bags. There was a bag for each building on the property and each one he

      Greetings everybody! This week I was only able to head over to the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse for one day due to a personal reason with the museum's curator, Felipe. I any case however we were able to meet on Wednesday, October 2nd to continue organizing the museum's collection in PastPerfect as more and more items make their way into the Pacetti Hotel's various exhibits.     This primarily consisted of going through a large of number of accessions to figure out what items were correctly moved in PastPerfect and what still needed to be moved. This took most of the day, but Felipe also had us preparing for the week of October 13th-16th when the Florida Association of Museums or FAM is holding their annual conference and exposition in Daytona Beach. Felipe let us know that he is going to be attending this conference during that week, but that wanted to make sure that Holly and myself had a project we could work on independently while he was away from the lighthouse. We deci

    Good afternoon, everyone! This week, I spent my time at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse continuing to work on the Pacetti Hotel's newest exhibits. However, we spent this week researching and writing about the items on display in these exhibits, working to write accurate text panels for each exhibit to give them context and inform visitors of the pertinent details of the items.      As you can imagine, this process involved good, old-fashion historical research to properly date and describe the various items. This process consisted first, of locating the objects that needed text panels in PastPerfect. Then, we checked what information about the  items were already on record. For most items we just needed to know what it was and what time period it came from since not every item needed super detailed descriptions. For certain items however, it was important to write notes about what the item was and what it did. For instance, in the Pacetti Hotel's Living Room, there is a small hu

     Hello everybody! This week felt shorter than some of the previous weeks, however it was still another productive week at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse. While I did not get to experience anything new, I did get to continue working on the Pacetti Hotel's newest display cases, making sure that the were filled with interesting artifacts from the hotel and that they were interesting to examine.     On Monday, Felipe, Holly, and I started brainstorming ideas for what displays we could create for each of the three upstairs bedroom closets.  Each bedroom is modeled after a different era of the hotel and each features furniture and decorations from the period, to give viewers a sense of what the bedrooms might have looked like in the 1880s, 1920s, and the 1970s. Each of these bedrooms is equipped with a closet just to the right of the doorway that, upon the museum's opening, were empty, with no displays to be seen. This was one of the biggest things that Felipe and the rest of the mus