The Vision for the Future

Photo: Part of the HCCAAC section in the HCC library

My internship came to an end on May 12. For the final stage of our work at the internship, we were introduced to the library space. The Howard County Center of African American Culture has a dedicated library room at Howard Community College, which is available as a research and study space to the students. Similar to our work in the museum, our job is to catalogue all of the books in our Google Sheet, and then transfer them all over to the PastPerfect museum software. 

For a lot of the semester, the work I was doing for the Center felt repetitive and a little bit tedious, even though I knew it was important. When my internship supervisor met with us to introduce us to the library space, we had a talk that reinforced how important our work was and made me even more happy to be part of it. When we arrived at the library, we explored and were shown this corner of the library where they had some of the handmade exhibits from the Center’s old programming, and a photo and dedication to the Center’s founder, Mrs. Wylene Sims Burch. This sparked a conversation and the Center and its goals for the future of outreach and education. 

The Center used to be deeply involved in their community and did outreach programs, fundraisers, and in-house and traveling exhibits. Due to lack of funding, they have been unable to continue their programming to the extent that they used to. After COVID and their flood in 2021, they lost track of a lot of their collections, which began the need for the work that the interns and I have been doing. Now, they are only able to offer tours and exhibits by request, and host a limited number of events throughout the year. What we’ve been doing, helping catalogue and locate their museum and library collections, is a small but important contribution to the end goal of the Center regaining its footing to continue their mission of  “engaging community, promoting progress, transforming lives through culture, history and awareness.”

Thrown into the 3D Deep End and Coming Out a Pro

    I have spent the last several months at arguably one of the best places in the country to learn about 3D capture, and I have gotten an incredible amount out of that experience so far. When I started in February the position that I was interning for was fairly nebulous, initially being kind of a general position where I helped people out in the background and months later ending up in a bit of a developer and exploratory R&D role. This shift was due to the absolutely awesome level of autonomy that I was given, which initially arose from a day or two period early in the internship where everyone who was in the office was more or less busy and occupied and I didn't have anyone to shadow or explicitly tell me what to do. I took this time to start messing with a 3D javascript library called three.js to see what I could do with it, after I had a conversation previously with management about the lack of presentational materials when they do a deliverable hand-off to clients (mentioned in my last blog post). They saw what I was able to put together relatively quickly and asked if certain things were possible and for many of the things I told them I had no real idea and wouldn’t know until I tried, so I tried. They gave me the space to do so, so I just kept trying things and the culmination of that is a comprehensive viewer platform for various types of 3D data, with the company now planning on using it internally over the summer (at least). 
    Direct Dimensions works on 3D captures of very tiny things, huge outdoor scenes, engineering related things, cultural heritage related things, things that require exact precise measurement and things that are purely for visualization. This wide array of subjects and purposes makes it difficult to really convey what they do to the general public, but the gist is that they’re good at all of it and are genuinely capable of capturing the world for any application that you can think of. During the development of this application, I made sure to import and play with every data type that they had on hand in order to get an idea of what it would take to display that data reasonably well on the web. The big three are 3D mesh models (with multiple distinct types), point clouds from lidar or laser scans, and gaussian splats. There are platforms that handle each of these, but none that handle all reasonably well in an open, non locked-down manner. I was able to compile notes from a ton of reading and hammer down a workflow for each type that used the best possible techniques and technology in terms of compression, chunked streaming and level of detail loading in order to get a smooth user experience for each that could display well on even modest computers or phones while not sacrificing detail. I looked at many other programs and basically took the best ideas from each while fixing the things I felt were not good or impeded the user experience. They like the application enough that they asked me if I could integrate it with one of their automated scanner products, and I have heard them make clients aware of its existence (which bodes very well for my potential future at the company).
    I ended up becoming knowledgeable about many file types and capture methods and now have an opinion on what $50,000 lidar scanner is best (it's wild to me that I got hands on one). I have played with a bunch of programs for processing 3D data and now have a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape. I can not truly state how valuable this internship has been, and I hope that I can give back in a meaningful way. Aside from the software that I have put together I have also been experimenting with scene reconstruction and gaussian splats in particular, which are a bit of a frontier in terms of the tech and is a space that is progressing and moving incredibly quickly. I have been paying attention to academic papers that have been coming out and try to be the one that makes the rest of the company aware of the latest and greatest, and I believe that in the coming years there will be a distinct shift away from creating 3D content with very rigidly defined manipulations of XYZ coordinates to more so growing and evolving 3D content from carefully prepared seed data. Basically this will make a lot of the vision-oriented (as opposed to metrology or archival) use cases for 3D scan data affordable and workable, and we will be able to use generative techniques to repair and augment scan data in new ways. One example would be taking a 3D laser scan of an old or damaged building to get accurate base geometry and then pairing it with photos of what the building looked like 100 years ago in order to create an accurate 3D model of the building as it once was. You would be combining the real with the inferred, but the data is all there so nothing would have to be speculatively created from assumptions. What someone would previously have to meticulously model by hand could be done reasonably quickly (under supervision) to create an asset that could be used in a museum or in a virtual experience. It’s something I find very exciting, and I am lucky to be this close to a technological frontier. All in all I am incredibly grateful for the experience I have had here over this semester and can not wait to continue the work that I have started. 

Below is another screenshot of the web application that I put together, this time of the editor/scene composition interface which shows a lidar scan of the Direct Dimensions building that I was present during the capture of. Usually point clouds like these are locked into difficult to use and heavy desktop applications.

Celebrating National Volunteer Week

Museums and historic sites all across the country recently celebrated National Volunteer Week from April 19th to 26th, and Riversdale House Historic Site and Museum was no exception. As many of my colleagues in the realm of public history are probably well aware, museums generally have very small staffs and even smaller budgets. Therefore, it is essential that places like Riversdale are armed to the teeth with a crew of volunteers of able body and mind, ready to take on any task that a given day may call for. Our volunteers truly come from all walks of life, ranging from young teenagers to elderly retirees. No matter who you are, we can find something for you to do!

Volunteers assist us with a wide variety of tasks here at the historic site and museum. Most importantly, volunteers lead two daily tours of the historic mansion that is the centerpiece of this historic site every weekend. Volunteers also assist with administrative tasks like staffing the front desk and sorting mail. They can even be found working in the community garden on site, or helping out with historical cooking demonstrations or other special events. See my previous post for more on historical cooking!

As someone who started his journey in the museum world as a volunteer here at Riversdale two years ago, I have experienced firsthand the personal enrichment and sense of purpose that volunteering provides. Now that I am employed at Riversdale as a part time staff member, seeing volunteers contribute to our mission of inclusive interpretation continues to be a source of joy.

When I found out from one of my colleagues that it was National Volunteer Week, I jumped at the chance to help her assemble gift bags as tokens of appreciation for the many volunteers who assist us day in and day out. Gift bags included notepads, pens, t-shirts, and my personal favorite, a mason jar-style water bottle complete with a straw and an inspirational message to boot!

Brunch is Served

At the Riversdale House Historic Site and Museum, we periodically host cooking demonstrations organized by our Kitchen Guild volunteers. On April 26, 2026, the Kitchen Guild held a “Spring Brunch” cooking demonstration. Was “spring brunch” a “thing” in the early nineteenth century? I am not sure, it’s above my pay grade. Regardless, it was a fun idea that had some great turnout from community members and helped generate interest in the museum. So, putting my grumbling aside about the historicity of spring brunch, I can say that all in all this was a successful program and I am glad that I could participate in it. Before proceeding any further, I would like to issue a disclaimer to anyone reading this that is interested in visiting a Kitchen Guild demonstration: you will not be allowed to eat the food. Food safety regulations prevent us from being allowed to serve the food we make for guests. You would think that the county would give us a historical exemption, but alas.

On this particular day, the Kitchen Guild menu included smoked herring, a root vegetable called salsify, and “hoe cakes.” I think the smoked herring is pretty self-explanatory, we picked that up from Giant the day before the demonstration and it was ready to cook straight out of the package. Salsify and hoe cakes, on the other hand, required me to dig a little deeper, or perhaps hoe a little deeper (forgive the pun) to understand what they actually were. 

Salsify grows abundantly in the wild and can be cooked easily with minimal preparation. It is similar in taste and texture to parsnips. Given that it grows in the wild it likely would have been an important source of food for enslaved people and other early American settlers who would have been struggling to scrape out a living. Hoe cakes are a bread dish made from cornmeal, water, and salt. Along with salsify, hoe cakes would have likely been a staple of diets for poor families in early America, particularly enslaved people and those living on the Appalachian frontier where agricultural opportunities were much more limited than on the coast.

Celebrating Black History Month at Riversdale

 On February 22, 2026, the Riversdale House Historic Site and Museum held an event called “Plummer’s Kitchen.” This event was named after an enslaved man  Adam Plummer who was enslaved at Riversdale from the age of 10 in 1829 all the way up to emancipation in 1864. Plummer resided at the site for six more years as a paid foreman before purchasing a nearby parcel of land called Mount Rose in 1870, in what is now the town of Edmonston. Plummer is notable among enslaved people in that he was able to read and write, and kept a diary for most of his life chronicling events in his own life and that of his family’s. In 1927 his daughter Nellie Arnold Plummer drew upon this diary as the main source material for a history of the family’s journey from slavery to freedom under the title Out of the Depths or the Triumph of the Cross. The diary itself is in the collections of the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D. C. 

Plummer’s Kitchen was an attempt to demonstrate the foods that enslaved people in Maryland might have eaten on a typical day. This event took place both in honor of both Black History Month and as part of the effort to give greater recognition to the enslaved men and women who lived and worked at Riversdale. Part of Riversdale’s initiative to be more inclusive in its interpretation has focused on highlighting the experiences of those who have historically been marginalized. One example of a largely forgotten figure in the Riversdale story is of a cook named Sam. Little is known about Sam other than that he was a skilled cook who particularly excelled at making stews. This information was gathered from the writings of Rosalie Calvert, who appeared to be pleased with his work, having stated that she was “glad [she] bought the cook.”

Unfortunately, most of Sam’s story is relegated to a footnote in Rosalie’s diary and the remainder lost to time, along with the stories of countless others who were enslaved. At the very least, programs like Plummer’s Kitchen and other efforts to uplift the stories of enslaved people can help us better reconcile a complicated past with the present.

Artifacts and Accession Numbers

Photo: "Back Closet 2"

    In January of 2026, the interns and I returned to the Howard County Center for African

American Culture after winter break and got into the bulk of the collections. There is work to be

done both in the museum and in the library, but we started work in the museum’s “Back Closet

2” which had three bookshelves full of materials. All of the interns were given access to a

museum spreadsheet, which was divided into three tabs. The first tab was titled “Data Drafting”

and this was where we would record all of the information about objects that had attached

accession numbers. The second tab was for objects with conflicting accession numbers, and the

third was for objects with no accession numbers.

    The majority of what we catalogued over the first month had no accession numbers, and

were taken out of the closet for us by our internship supervisor. These included mostly paper

materials, including newspaper clippings, photographs, posters, calendars, community flyers,

family reunion records, and more. With these, we recorded all information available such as

dates, names, dimensions, materials, and condition, and left them organized in the center’s

office.

    After we finished with that portion of materials, we began on the rest of “Bookshelf 2” in

the back closet. Most of these objects now had accession numbers with them, and the vast

majority so far have been vinyl records that were bought, donated, or gifted to the center.

Recording objects with accession numbers is similar to the ones without, but we also had to

include the number, the source and collection, as well as the location (e.g. Back Closet 2,

Bookshelf 2, Shelf 3). After accessioned objects were recorded in the Data Drafting spreadsheet

tab, we then had to enter them into Past Perfect, the museum collection management software

that the center uses. Most of this was copy and pasting information from the spreadsheet to the

software, but there was quite a learning curve in getting accustomed to using PastPerfect. So far,

the internship has been mostly data collection and entry, and I’m gaining valuable experience in

handling and managing museum collections.

Bridging Documentation, Restoration and Presentation

     As an intern with no task specifically assigned, I have been able to float around Direct Dimensions a bit and see a few of the distinct departments that the company has and get a good idea of what each one does. I started out in the cultural heritage/art preservation area and spent a good amount of time with the project management head there. He was able to walk me through a few of their client interactions from inception to completion, and the breadth of what they do here is genuinely impressive. One of the projects I was lucky enough to get a peek into involved working with the Central Park Conservatory to document, preserve and rehabilitate historic stonework and art installations including the Bethesda Terrace and the hippos in the Safari Playground. The Bethesda Terrace work mostly consisted of extensive scanning for documentation, but the hippo project consisted of scanning the sculptures for the explicit purpose of restoration and extended into the fabrication of exact replicas of hippo sculptures that were found to be in especially poor condition. The amount of work that this entailed was extensive but the end result is absolutely worth it, and now the hippo sculptures can continue to add to the makeup and personality of the park.

    A project in the architectural division involved documenting a historical building in Anne Arundel County that was due to be demolished for reasons related to safety, as the building was vacant for a number of years and contained high amounts of asbestos and other harmful materials. The deliverable here was a bit nebulous, as the client wanted the building documented but did not have a specific use in mind for the 3D data that was obtained. Management was brainstorming things to do with the data that could add value to the final product and brought me into the conversation, where I was able to think about it a bit and see that the package that they give to clients at the end of a project contained all of the raw data gathered, as well as specific formats of 3D models based on what purpose they would be used for. I realized the presentational aspect was entirely absent, aside from a SketchFab link that would display the 3D model so you can interact with it. This isn’t nothing, but I felt that it stripped the context entirely and thought I might play around and see what I could come up with to bridge that gap. Over the last month and a half, I was able to put together a basic platform for the company to host and display their 3D data in a way that better suites their needs, while keeping that data entirely under their control. I concentrated on the context aspect, adding the ability to display extensive archival-grade metadata, annotations, and data overlays (like drone flight paths) as well as many other features that cover their wide array of work. It has been an incredibly fun experience and I have learned an absolute ton about displaying 3D data on the web, as well as what they have taught me about the data capture process. My hope is that this project can evolve into something more comprehensive and be a genuine addition to their offerings long-term.

    Below is a screenshot of a scan they did of the National Katyń Memorial in Baltimore City presented in the web viewer I assembled. I did research and included the history of the memorial, the history of the massacre that the memorial is dedicated to the victims of, as well as the history of the scan that was performed. Direct Dimensions was contracted by the National Katyń Memorial Foundation to scan the memorial and do area calculations of the bronze and gold leaf materials for cost estimation purposes for repair and preservation. For this project the 3D model was more of a side effect than anything else, but we were able to create interactive documentation that the foundation can use to raise awareness for the memorial and preserve the memorial as it is right now for future generations, with full historical context present.

 

Stories in Storage

Photo: The exterior of the Howard County Center for African American Culture building

    Last semester, fall of 2025, I was hired along with two other students for an intern position with the Howard County Center for African American Culture. The hiring process was long, but not complicated. I was initially denied the internship, but they reached out to me about a month and a half later and asked if they could interview me to see if I could join the team. It ended up being less of an interview and more of a meeting to ask me when I could start. 

There wasn't much information about what the internship would have me do except for the position description in the initial email. All it said was that there had been a flood in 2021 that meant they needed to rapidly remove the museum's collections out of the building, and that now they were looking to recatalogue everything. I would be taught how to handle, record, and catalogue museum collections, which was the exact area of museum studies that I was interested in learning more about. After the interview, I joined the other two interns for an onboarding meeting and found out that the work hadn't started yet. We met once in November to become acquainted with the museum space and learn more about the center, and then once in December to start learning the hands-on skills before the holidays. I learned quickly that since the center was largely run by volunteers, everything took a little longer than usual to get started. 

The Howard County Center for African American Culture has an abundance of fascinating artifacts, books, documents, music, and more, a large portion of which sat unorganized in their upstairs storage closets. My internship supervisor, Dr. Kyla Cools, introduced us to the space, the artifacts, accession numbers, and Past Perfect, the museum collection software that we would be using to record all of the items. In January, after winter break, we all returned to the center to begin working consistently. 

 

History in Three Dimensions

Jake Marino

 

 Photo: Direct Dimensions employee using LiDAR to capture the Three Soldiers Vietnam war memorial statue in Washington, D.C.

    This semester I am lucky enough to be interning at a company called Direct Dimensions located in Owings Mills, MD. The company was started by the owner Michael Raphael in the mid-1990s as a metrology company that specialized in digitizing measurements of real-world objects for use in applications like CAD software, and over the years they became one of the premiere companies in the field of 3D scanning. The level of capture they can process is measured in microns at the most advanced level, and they use this skillset for everything from capturing for visual reference to capturing for exact replication and restoration. They have departments focused on specific types of capture, but my position is in the cultural heritage section of the company that works with artwork and historical artifacts and places. They are known very well in this domain due to their high level of technical expertise, doing scanning work for the National Parks Service, the Smithsonian and many other museums all over the country to preserve significant artifacts and aid in restoration as well as digitize items for public display on the internet and information kiosks in the museums themselves.

    My position initially was working on messaging in the cultural heritage space. This came about in a conversation I had during my interview where I talked about how important I thought the work they do is, and over the course of the meeting I laid out some ideas I had regarding working with museums and online institutions like Wikipedia to make scans of important cultural items more accessible. I am still doing that work but the company is inherently technical, so they have allowed me to do some exploratory work on that side as well. I have been able to see what they do for their process, from scanning and taking pictures, to processing of the raw data, to creating and cleaning up models, to presentation and even fabrication. It is incredibly interesting and overall, just super cool from every direction. I’m excited to see what I get to work on and to just be in this space as a preservationist, it’s a great opportunity in a field that most people probably don’t really think about but has very wide applications and huge future potential.