Week 10: October 21 and 23

     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 Storage" room, so that guest can still experience them. This meant that for most of Monday, I was accessioning items like glassware, china, and ash trays, which the hotel has acquired a lot of. While not anything drastically different from what I have been working on over the last few weeks, I did continue to get more comfortable working in PastPerfect on my own, which I was proud of myself for.

    On Wednesday, I began the day much like Monday, with me arriving and quickly beginning another round of accessions. About halfway through the day however, Felipe came to me with a small project to work on. With the lighthouse having a number of signs on their buildings and around their property, they need to be cleaned, especially after an event like Hurricane Milton. So, Felipe and I set out to test a number of different cleaning methods for both the museum's plastic signs and their copper signs. We collected a number of different cleaning solutions such as vinegar, bleach, and soapy water and used the museum's employee parking sign as our subject. We divided the sign into three sections and used each method on one section. When it came to removing dirt and grime, the bleach was the clear winner, with soapy water coming in second place. Once we had determined that the bleach was the best option, we quickly cleaned the rest of the sign until it sparkled and then rinsed it with clean water. Next, we attempted to figure out how best to clean the copper signs which can found on some of the lighthouse's exhibit buildings. In this case, we tried to clean the copper sign on the outside of the museum's Lens Exhibit building which had been covered in dirt and had started to rust very visibly. We tried two methods for the copper sign, a mixture of water and baking soda and another mixture of water and citric acid. Like with the plastic sign, we divided the copper sign into two sections and tried each mixture on one section. Unfortunately, neither solution did very much to clean the sign and so, Felipe and I were forced to abandon the effort and try again another time. Once we had finished up, all that was left to do was record our results and save them so that, going forward, we had record of what worked and what didn't.

    Overall, this was not unlike my previous weeks with the lighthouse, but I did get to learn a lot more about what sorts of responsibilities museum staff have outside of things like exhibit design and collections management. Making sure that all of the signs around the property are clean and legible is certainly very important to a museum's impression on people, but it was certainly not something I would have thought about before my internship. Additionally, the work I did with Felipe on the museum's signs taught me that as a curator, you need to know things outside of just history. In this case, my high school chemistry knowledge was tested as Felipe gave me a crash course in things like acidic and basic solutions and ferrous metals.