Week 9: October 14th and 16th

     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 was gone to continue organizing the Pacetti Hotel's collection. Unfortunately, Hurricane Milton forced FAM's 2024 conference to be indefinitely postponed, so instead of presenting at the event, Felipe was at the lighthouse, having planned to not be there at all.

    Because of this, Felipe did not have time to pivot and get something more hand-ons for us to start working on, since we are still waiting for some certain exhibits to get the plexiglass needed of them. So for both Monday and Wednesday this week, Holly and I worked to accession a plethora of items that had yet to be accurately recorded within PastPerfect. This process consisted a of going down a list of donated items that had not been accessioned and then accessioning them within the software. To begin, you first have to create a new accession and then make a new accession number for it, in this case the first number we created was 2024-45. Then we would look at the list of items and see something along the lines of "Antique clock. 1880s, label reads 'made in America.' When accessioning items, the most important things that you want to state what the item is, what date it is approximately from, and then provide a short description. For most items, this can pretty short and simple. You want enough detail so that someone can distinguish one antique clock from the next, but not so much that you have more than a few sentences. You want to note things such as color, shape, size, and any distinguishing marks or writing. For other, more specific or valuable items, a longer description explaining its significance is acceptable. Once all of this has been complete, you would label the clock you just accessioned as 2024-45-1 and move onto the next item. Remember that an accession is more like a collection and one can have multiple items within it.    

    And that was all I did this week. While not overly exciting by any means, this sort of monotonous work is a reality that all museums go through. Paper work is the foundation of good organization and when you're talking about a museum that has potentially thousands of artifacts in their collection, good organization is what will determine your competency. I think that getting used to this sort of office job is important to do since, in a much larger museum, this would be someone's entire job versus here at the lighthouse where it is only a small portion of the curator's job.