Internship AOK Special Collections Post #2

For this second blog post I will be focusing on my main project with the AOK Special Collections at UMBC. The collection holds millions of photographs from the Baltimore sun and other newspapers in the area, however, these collections take a lot of time to process, prepare, and store correctly. The main job I have been working on is collecting the large boxes of files from the palates they were delivered on and rehouse the folders into smaller, more workable boxes. While this is only one step in the larger process of taking care of the collection and the photographs it holds, I have noticed a few interesting points that I will be discussing below. In a normal semester this is where the blog post would likely end, however, given the extreme circumstances that have befallen the university and the country this year I will briefly talk about the future of the internship at the end of the post.  

The first point I want to discuss might seem obvious, but it is important to talk about nonetheless. That is, funding is the greatest factor in getting work done at a collection. Again this seems like a no-brainer. Of course an institution needs funding to work. However, this extends to more places than one might initially guess. As previously mentioned the task I am working on entails rehousing files into smaller boxes. However, the availability of these boxes can be an extremely limiting factor in how much work can be done. The collections had over a hundred boxes on hand when I started and those were quickly used up. This led to my last post where I talked about the other project I worked on while more boxes were ordered, however, even then the project will likely need yet another order or two before there are enough boxes to rehouse all of the photographs on the palettes. 

This leads to the second point, which is that all of those boxes take up a ton of space. Once again this seems like an obvious point, however, it is easy to underestimate just how much space can be taken up in a relatively short amount of time by a project like this. With only around a quarter of the boxes rehoused there are already about one and a half full storage shelves taken up by the files. This will only increase as the project progresses.

The last point is time. These boxes are heavy and it is a time consuming process to re-house them, reshelve them, and record what is in each box. Unfortunately, this is only complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the campus shutdown. As it sits right now, my intention is to finish the rest of my hours and my last blog post over the summer, but even that is uncertain. We do not have a definite date for the reopening of the campus or even the end of the recently announced stay-at-home order in Maryland. When I do return I will be able to finish this project, which is not that bad for the nature of the work I am doing. However, many are not that lucky and more time sensitive projects have been thrown into limbo. This will be my last post until campus reopens and until then I, like many others, will be trying to get used to working and living from home. 

Cataloging Gaithersburg's Past

My last few weeks at the Gaithersburg Community Museum were spent cataloging their large collection of images. Joanna Church, who works at the Jewish Museum of Maryland full time during the weekdays, works at the Gaithersburg Museum on the weekends. She has been cataloging the museum’s artifacts and images for years. She says the main issue with their image collection is that many images are not sorted into individual files. As a result, they cannot be sure what exactly they have in the collection. My main task has been separating the image files so that they are more easily searchable and therefore usable in exhibits and events. 

I began learning the PastPerfect software by doing the training modules that come with the program. Additionally, Joanna gave me a tutorial and an overview of the relevant functions of the software. Using a catalog list Joanna compiled with the multi-image files needing separation, I began separating the files and writing unique descriptions for them. As a Germantown native, one of the most interesting image sets were pictures of the ruins of Clopper Mill on Clopper Road. As the images were all similar it was difficult to write different descriptions for each. Even still, it was interesting to sort through the image files, and very satisfying once all the images are separated and in order. 

In addition to the cataloging, the Census Day exhibit was still a top priority. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, the event scheduled for April 1st has been canceled. Additionally, all Gaithersburg city employees were ordered to work from home, so we have been unable to put the exhibit together for now. The last time I went to the museum was for a weekend meeting with the community facility manager Nansie Wilde, program coordinator Karen Lottes, Joanna, and myself to discuss the exhibit. At that time the museum was closed to the public, but we were still able to go in. My task was to collect general census related images to use in the exhibit. I mostly found them on census.gov, and collected images of census taker badges, census posters, and other images. I compiled them and sent them to the group. As of now, the exhibit is delayed, but we plan to put it together and play catch up once we are able to return to the museum. 

Internship at the Priddy Library (What I am Currently Doing)

By the beginning of March, I have finally fixed Omeka. There were many problems with the site that I had briefly mentioned before but with no great detail. Some of the difficulties that I faced with Omeka were about exhibits not being uploaded or hidden to the public. There were also new issues where items/exhibits were duplicated and showing up on the main site. In addition, there were also mystery items, which would have the name Priddy Library History #0. I had to sort through the files and make sure the items that I was deleting would not affect anything on the main page. I also had to find a way to have the hidden exhibits viewable to the public. While I was dealing with those issues, I was also trying to figure out what to do with the Priddy Library History items. A couple of them were repeats of other items that had another name such as Communications 2015. When I found a repeat of a Priddy Library History item, I would delete it to keep things simple. For the rest of the History items, I ended up leaving them alone and putting them in a file that is unviewable to the public. The process of cleaning up Omeka took a few days to finish. I will say that I m very proud of myself. I was not sure if I was going to be able to do this on my own, but I proved myself wrong. The site is not neat, and every project is viewable, including the ones I worked on.


 

1.1 The Communications project that I did as seen through the Priddy Library Exhibits. 


The other project that I am working on, which I mentioned before, is the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in America. I was able to find another person to join the team, but that still leaves only three students working on the project and one staff member, Irene Munster. Munster wanted the project to get started, so we finally picked a theme. Since there is so much to cover, we are going to pick the theme that focuses on individual women from certain states. The suffrage movement is complex; white women did not allow black women to be a part of the movement. There is also a lack of Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic groups that are barely seen at all in the movement. Using the other themes such as the timeline would be challenging to do since it would not show individual women and tell what impact they had on the movement. The new plan is to talk about what happened in 1920 and focus on minorities. Then we will pick three to four women from Maryland, D.C., and Virginia. We may also look into what women are currently doing for women's rights. Right now, I am working on cleaning up the women's suffrage files, adding information about the women I have found, and looking up information on minorities. Due to the coronavirus, this will take a while to do. Luckily most of what I am doing can be worked on at home. I am sure by April, the project will pick back up and we will finally start working on the poster.

Internship with Catoctin Furnace Historical Society #1

At the start of this semester I began working with Catoctin Furnace Historical Society. They are located in Thurmont Maryland. There mission it to preserve the local furnace as well as the local town that surrounded the furnace. They are also involved in several archeology projects in the surrounding area. They work to use forensics to recreate the faces and identify the slaves who worked in the furnace. 

I was extremely excited to get started with the Catoctin furnace Historical Society.  I talked to my internship boss mostly through email as we were deciding on a project for me. It was decided that I would be working at their local museum every Sunday from 2 to 4 until a project was decided on. Below are some pictures I took while working at their museum.

I also attended one of their monthly meetings where I was given a project. It was decided that I would be working on writing descriptions for a book they are working on publishing with Arcadia Publishing. This means I spend most of my time working with my internship at home writing on my computer. Every Friday at 1 pm I have a phone conference with my two bosses where we talk about my progress. Writing a book has always been a lifelong dream of mine; ever since I was little my goal in life was to become a published author, and now I am given the opportunity to do so.

Gaithersburg Community Museum Internship: The Beginnings

The Beginnings

Hello! My name is Brett, and I am a senior at UMBC! This spring semester I have been interning at the Gaithersburg Community Museum. The two main projects I am helping with are cataloging artifacts and preparing and designing the exhibit for the upcoming Census Day event on April 1, 2020. Additionally, I help with odds and ends at the museum, whether it be filling in at the front desk when someone is out, or interacting with patrons. The museum is a small museum in the center of Old Towne Gaithersburg. It resides in an old train station which played an influential role in the development of the city. Additionally, it has three old train cars and a plaza out front. The museum is owned by the City of Gaithersburg and conducts many events at the museum and the plaza out front. 

I work with Joanna Church to catalog artifacts using the PastPerfect software. So far our work has included separating image files within PastPerfect to make them more easily searchable. For the Census Day event, I conducted research at the Montgomery History Library. Searching through census data was both challenging and rewarding. The most difficult part is deciding who was considered Gaithersburg before the city was incorporated. In order to do this, I had to learn more about the history of Gaithersburg and which families were influential. Using these families as a guideline, I did my best to tally up the numbers of free and enslaved people living in Gaithersburg before the 1870s. 

My numbers may not be perfectly accurate, but the practice of history is really educated guesswork, right? Though it was somewhat tedious to comb through all the rough data, it was exciting as well. For instance, in researching, I learned about a free black woman living in Montgomery County in the early to mid-1800s who named herself Anarchy. This was an interesting find among the records. A less exciting but still interesting piece of information I learned through this research was that many of the large families that built the city were slave owners with dozens of enslaved people working their land. This was not a shock necessarily but we tend to think about slavery as a faraway distant part of history, but the truth is that Maryland and even small communities like Gaithersburg are stained with the legacy of slavery.

This image is a copy of one of the Census documents I used for research.

Internship AOK Special Collections Post #1

For my internship with the UMBC Library Special Collections I have been working on a number of projects concerning the archive of Baltimore sun photos stored in the basement. While more supplies are being ordered for the main rehousing project, I had the opportunity to work on a pilot project cataloging the contents of one of the boxes full of photo negatives from the Sun’s photographers. I wanted to take this first post as an opportunity to talk about  three of the interesting aspects of the collection of photographs and the stories with which they correlated. 

The first major surprise in going through these folders was the sheer number of photographs the newspaper collected every day. On Thursday December 1, 1994, there were thirty stories photographed by 16 photographers amassing over 1500 photographs. While it was one of the larger folders in the box it was by no means the most dense and the whole month of december ended up with more than 23000 photographs taken. Of course, only a small fraction of these photographs ended up being published and made publicly available, but it is interesting to think about just how much information or insight might be stored in the other photographs preserved in the box. 

The next interesting point that going through the negatives impressed upon me was the variety of stories that the paper covered every day. As the box in question stored the photographs taken from  December 1, 1994-January 7, 1995 there are many of the types of stories that one would expect to see. Christmas lights, Hanukkah parties, and salvation army collectors are all recorded throughout the month along with the fires, crimes, and sporting events that popped up day to day. However, there are also photographs from interviews conducted throughout the month and from a series of recurring articles highlighting different students in the city. There are flower shows and government events alongside  stories on recycling and studio art glass. We as historians tend to look at newspapers as snapshots of daily life in their places of publication, however, to me it seems like going through the photographs in this fashion provides a distilled version of that same snapshot view. 

The last point I wanted to talk about actually caused me some frustration in recording and cataloging these folders. That is the insight into each photographer's process in taking the photographs and packaging them to the newspaper. Some photographers went by slightly different names or nicknames than those recorded by the newspaper in their labels while others simply did not write their names on the packets of negatives at all. Other sets of negatives came with a whole paragraph describing biographical details about the person or event being captured while others had no label or descriptions. As someone trying to record the contents of the individual folders this was not the most ideal situation forcing me to at times try to hold the negatives up to the light to see what was going on. However, for a researcher looking at these photographers a lot can be gained by seeing how they present their work and what information they feel is important to record.