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

    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

      Good afternoon everybody ! This week was a rather exciting one at the lighthouse since I was afforded the opportunity to go hands-on with some of the museum's collection in order to begin developing some future exhibits for the Constance D. Hunter Historic Pacetti Hotel. This was quite exciting for me because  not only was I getting to learn first-hand how museum curators designed exhibits, but I actually got to be a part of that design process.     We began by tackling the biggest challenge before us on Monday. On the second floor of the Pacetti Hotel is a room that the museum staff wanted to turn into the Pacetti Hotel's "Visible Storage Room" which would showcase the large collection of artifacts from the hotel that the  museum did not fit with another exhibit. The room will be blocked off with a plexiglass door so that visitors to the museum can look into the room and see the various pieces of furniture and knick-knacks in the collection without being able t

     Good evening, everybody! This week, I was only at the lighthouse for one day due to Labor Day, however, I still got to do something interesting. In the morning on Wednesday, September 4th, I continued learning my way around PastPerfect, the museum's archiving software. Instead of simply relocating items in PastPerfect from their storage locations to their display locations, Felipe had Holly and I accessioning a few items from the beginning, detailing what the items were, when they were created and used, and who gave them to the museum. Felipe advised us that, while this was one of the more tedious processes involved with museum curation, it was very important to do correctly so that items can be easily located even if you only have a limited amount of information about an item. If an item has been accessioned correctly, you should be able to find items within PastPerfect even if you only know that an item was a fork, and it was donated by John Doe. If that's all you know,