Asia In Context Part 2

The next major hurdle for the internship was catering. During the conference we decided to provide both breakfast and lunch. For lunch we wanted to be sure to have a wide variety of selection so that we could cater to everyone’s dietary needs. Through various emails and phone calls with both Glenmore and Chartwells. It was decided that we would use Glenmore. We created a unique Mediterranean menu that included both vegetarian and non-vegetarian options.

We decided to invite a handful of secondary school teachers. As a pull for them to attend they were offered the latest copies of one of the speakers books. Beyond that I created a master list of UMBC History and Asian Studies professors and the various published books they have written. We decided to have these books on display during the conference in hopes of promoting them. I had to do some searching online to find hard copies that were not too expensive for all the books. Once that was done we quickly ordered the books in hopes that they would arrive before the conference (they did!).

The majority of the internship has been emailing. As the RSVP’s for the conference started to come in I created a spreadsheet in order to keep track of who was planning to attend and their contact information. Since the RSVP’s were emailed to me, it was easy to keep everything organized and online. This came in handy when it became time to send the papers out. Two of the emails bounced back but we were able to back through the initial RSVP sheets and work out where the typo was. The papers were sent two weeks before the conference, in hopes that everyone would have time to read through them before the conference.

            At this point I have been doing my internship with the Priddy Library at USG for a little over two months. This internship continues to give me insight into the world of Library Sciences. I have helped to put together multiple exhibitions with the library staff. We care currently working on doing research and gathering images for our next exhibit on the Bosnian Genocide.

            As a part of our research and preparation we set up a visit to the Library of Congress. This was an amazing experience. Our group got a behind the scenes tour getting to go underneath the building in the tunnels that connect the buildings of the LOC. Our first stop was to the Prints and Photographs Division. Here we got a brief introduction to the research process and how you go about obtaining information. We were able to find many images that will be useful to our exhibit. The second stop was a meeting that was set up with the head of the South Slavic and European Division, Angela Cannon. She was one of the most knowledgeable people I had ever met. She radiated a willingness to help us with our research by providing us with a brief lecture followed by sources she had gathered that have been extremely helpful in conducting our research. If I become a librarian she is one of the role models as to what type of librarian I would like to be. To be knowledgeable and personable with the strong desire to share my knowledge with others and help them in their research. I enjoyed my experience so much at the LOC and I suggest that everyone go at least one time. The director of the library was moved by our groups experience and starting next semester wants to set up visits every semester where history and public history students can have the same opportunity.

            Another part of my internship is to work with the Pleasant View Historical Site. This process is slow going. It took awhile to set up a meeting because of conflicting schedules. Last week were all finally able to come together to do an assessment of the site. Our group observed the grounds, buildings and the objects and artifacts that are housed there. PVHS is collaborating with Preservation Montgomery and another organization to start restoring the building. The library has to assess what level of involvement and how much help they can provide to the site or if our job will be to connect PVHS with the Pratt Free Library that helps smaller historical organizations with projects like these. The next step is to have a meeting to discuss these things and how we proceed.

The Enterprise Farmer's Club

Alicia Cooper

October 27, 2015

History Internship

Blog Post #2

 I have truly enjoyed interning here at the Sandy Spring Museum. The Museum is small but has a vast collection that has been donated by the Sandy Spring, Olney, and Brookeville community. The staff on hand are very helpful and full of knowledge. I have been working closely with the archives director Lydia. We have worked together to find me a project will benefit the museum and the community. They have decided to increase the accessibility and findability of the Enterprise Farmers Club minutes which started in 1865. I will be creating something akin to an archival finding aid. With the increased the accessibility of the collection will facilitate its exposure to a broader audience as a valuable resource for both social and agricultural history.

 Many attribute the strength of Sandy Spring’s sense of community to its abundant and enduring social organizations. One of the oldest organizations that continue to meet today is the Enterprise Farmer’s Club; the club is celebrating its 150^th anniversary this year. The Enterprise Club was originally formed to bring the community together to share knowledge and collectively solve the problems of soil depletion and agricultural yield inherited from previous tobacco-based farming. Many of Sandy Spring’s social organizations maintain meeting minutes in a consistent, formulaic format that stretches back to their origins. In 2005, The Enterprise Farmers Club donated to the Sandy Spring Museum their meeting minutes dating from the Club’s inception. As the Museum holds several such collections of meeting minutes from local social organizations, this assignment will also serve as a beta-project to help establish a format that can be applied across collections.

The final product will have both collection-level descriptions as well as item-level indexes. The collection-level description will include a collection summary, biographical/ organizational note, and scope and contents statement. To do this I will need to leverage contextual resources available in the Museum’s library and archives. In this project, the item-level refers to the individual meetings recorded in the minutes. I will also create an index to record biographic information related to attendance and membership as well as topics discussed during each meeting. In doing these things I hope to explore ways to capture the social aspects of the meetings including host site information as well as meal descriptions. This work will allow not only for increased access to meeting minutes’ content but also afford a longitudinal view of agricultural and social trends in the Sandy Spring community. So far I have only transcribed volume one of the meeting minutes.

 

Irish Railroad Workers Museum, Sep-Oct

I began working with the Irish Railroad Museum over the summer in more of a volunteer position, and my official internship began at the beginning in September.  I took interest in the location because of it’s small and local history, focusing on an Irish immigrant family in the last half of the 19th century.  The focus of my work there is not only to just learn about daily operations of a museum but also as a youthful voice to offer suggestions on how to modernize.  

Knowing a little bit about the Irish Railroad Workers Museum will help see why they were in need of that voice.  The two row houses that serve as the location are a few blocks away from the B&O museum, and have been restored to offer a glimpse into the home of an immigrant family.  One house has been designed to be a recreation, with period furniture throughout, and almost no labels or signs.  The house next door is more a welcome center where visitors come to watch a video to give them background of the neighborhood, time period, and the Feeley family themselves.  On the upper levels of this house aspects of Irish life in Baltimore, including work, religion, and recreation, are represented by pictures, artifacts, and text.  Overall it is a very small operation, with only one staff member who welcomes visitors, gives tours, and maintains the location three days a week.  

However, attendance has increased dramatically throughout the last year as the museum began using facebook as a way to connect with the community.  In a desire to reach more people some members of the board have taken a heavy interest in social media and the museum's online presence, which is where I have been putting most of my efforts.  

Because of the museum's small size and location, it’s almost impossible to expect people to drive by or happen upon it.  Because of it’s content it is appealing to a very specific group of people, who unfortunately, do not still live inside Baltimore City.  I have been working with a UMBC graduate student, Conor Donnan to build an online presence and hopefully encourage more visitors.  Our first task was the branch out onto Twitter and Instagram, and then focus on the content of the website itself.  Our biggest discussion has been about what image of the museum is being put out, and how to convey that through the internet.  Simply to gain an online presence I have considered posting every Thursday with the popular tbt tag (throw back Thursday) a picture of an part of the recreation Feeley home. For example if I posted a picture of the washing board in the kitchen, I would write a short paragraph explaining the great effort that doing laundry was back then, as well as the significance of washer women in Baltimore.

The website is very old and outdated, speaking from someone who is very used to user-friendly websites, I have to say that it was frustrating using something that hadn’t been updated since 2002.  Conor and I have been building up a possible replacement website where we were able to rewrite all of its content and put forward what we think is an image that will prove to be more helpful to prospective visitors.  By focusing more on the Feeley family and their lives in Baltimore instead of the creation of the museum itself we hope to more clearly express what visitors will see when they arrive for a visit.  I have made a point that as a kid I remember finding ‘recreation’ type museums far more interesting than the traditional format which involves a lot of staring and reading.  So I think that highlighting that quality on the website will encourage people especially those only a block over at the B&O, to bring their kids over to explore more on their own.  

So far my experience working with the museum has been beneficial and positive.  It has given me a more clear idea of where my interests and talents are and how those fit into my chosen career path.  I love that the museum is small, and I am given very hands tasks that allow me to really use the skills I have learned at UMBC so far, especially those in public history courses. There are several more plans for the rest of my internship that I am excited to get started on.  

Asia In Context

Asia in Context: The Human and Physical Environment is the name of the conference I am helping create. The conference is described as bringing together scholars doing exciting work in “reading” Asia beyond textual sources, exploring bodies, objects, and environments to build a more nuanced understanding of the Asian past and present. In the process, it also presents new approaches and methodologies for the study of Asian history and society.

A lot of my internship has been organization. The big first project was creating a directory of professors from the East Coast that would be interested in attending this conference. Finding History scholars with a focus in Asia was more or less easy to do but we wanted to invite more than just history scholars. This is where things became tricky, I spent the majority of a month combing through different universities and colleges directories finding scholars who have a focus in Asia. The master list had over two hundred names of possible attendees from up and down the East Coast.

After the master directory was made it came time to find a good place on campus where we can hold the conference. We decided on lecture hall 8 in the ITE building. Hopefully we chose wisely! The next step after that was advertisement. My advisor and I went through multiple versions of posters that could be use to spread the message to students and those not on the master directory list. After much back and forth we settled on two different versions that have been used for advertisement. We have posted on websites like H-Asia and through different means on campus in order to reach a broader audience. Luckily many students from Howard Community College are attending; we are hoping this is a good introduction to UMBC for them.

Montgomery History - Montgomery County Archives

The Montgomery County Archives reopened in November 2014 after a long period of storage. While a great deal of work was done to categorize and organize the collections to include the new additions gained while the Montgomery County public library. During my time at the Archives I tackled two projects – creating a finding aid for the Flat Files and one for the various Audio-Visual artifacts.

The Flat Files contain all the oversize paper documents and a number of audio visual artifacts as well. Prior to my internship there wasn’t any database for the Flat Files themselves. The only way to know what was in the boxes was to find a secession sheet within a particular folder of documents. I went through each box and included the name, a description, the location, and measurements if applicable. Through the process I found that a number of the items within the Flat Files were donated by the Montgomery County Public Library System and didn’t have any secession sheets. Creating the finding aid allowed me to find these artifacts and help future researchers to find them as well.

For the Audio-Visual materials I used AVCC by AV Preserve. AV Preserve runs the website in a sort of beta testing manner. The web based program allows the museum or archive to input information on the archival materials in a variety of categories. The program is more useful for the facility rather than the public as AVCC is not meant for the public.

For the Archives, it was incredibly useful. I went through all of the audio-visual materials in the collection, including the valuable oral history tapes. I was able to specify what the medium the materials were, letting Linda know that for some reason there were U-Matic and Betamax tapes. We joked that nobody would be able to watch those because nobody has a Betamax player anymore.

The most important outcome of using this software is that it allows the Archives and Montgomery History to assess which audio-visual records have the top priority for digitation. None of the materials in the archives have a digital record or any form of a “modern” medium. Certain materials – such as the oral histories – are more important to preserve than others – such as the records of random history lectures at Montgomery College in the 1970s. Funding is always an issue for smaller historical societies, of which the Montgomery County Archives is a part of, so being able to assess the priority of digitation and preservation is incredibly important.