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

      Good morning everybody! This week, I got the chance to participate in some light archaeology and conservation at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse and Museum, as we spent Monday and Wednesday collecting, cleaning, and organizing glass bottles that we found on the Pacetti Hotel property. On Monday, myself and Holly spent the morning collecting over 60 glass bottles, jugs, and jars of all shapes, sizes, and colors. For whatever reason, the small bits of wooded area that surround the Pacetti Hotel were filled with a number of unbroken bottles, jugs, and jars all dating from anywhere between the late 1800s up to the modern period, so Felipe had us scouring these areas in order to both, collect more bottles and help clean up the  property for visitors. The process consisted of carefully inspecting various sections of the woods and then collecting whatever bottles or glassware we could with either our hands or a special grabbing tool. Then we collected each item and stored them in some plasti

     Good evening everyone! For my internship this week, I got the opportunity to act as a museum conservator and got to work on the restoration of a number of artifacts recently acquired by the museum. On Monday, Holly and I got to work on a multi-step process for the restoration of a handful of metal artifacts in the museums collection. Due to the nature of metals, rust has a tendency to build up quite a lot on certain artifacts over long periods of time, so it is up to the conservator, or in this case the curator and curatorial staff, to prevent any further damage from happening to the artifacts. So, after putting on some gloves and some face masks, we got to work on stage one of the restoration process. The first thing we did on an item was to brush every inch of the rusted artifact with toothbrushes to remove flaking rust, dirt, and dust from the surface of the metal. Then, he took some soft-bristled paint brushes and applied a nice, even coat of a chemical called Kroil, which is

      Good afternoon everyone! This week at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse and Museum I continued gaining valuable experience working in a museum. This week, we focused on the process of deaccessioning items from the museum's collection. Sometimes, museums end up with more items in their collection than the need or can use, so they need to find new homes for these items, instead of doing something drastic like throwing things away. In this case, the lighthouse had a number of pieces of furniture dating from the 1880s all the way to about the 1950s.     The first step to deaccessioning an item from the museum's collection was to learn where the items had come from. In the case of these furniture pieces, they had all been graciously donated by residents of Ponce Inlet, so we looked back at the museum's accession records and reached out to all of the donors to learn if they  wanted any of their items returned to them before we moved on to other potential homes for the items. This