Week 11: October 28th and 30th
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