The second month of my internship has been just as exciting as the first.
For the majority of the month, I have continued scanning and cataloging donated photographs. The photos that I am working on come from the Laird Wise collection, and contain negatives of people, events, buildings, and various aspects of life in Talbot County. The Society was given a grant in order to digitally preserve the photographs and have obtained three computers and scanners, accompanied with the PastPerfect database.
The Society's photograph collection is primarily made up of three local professional photographers (Laird Wise, H. Robins Hollyday, and C.C. Harris), who's documentation of our region spans from 1870 to 1950. There are well over 100,000 negatives, prints, and slides in the photograph collection and I have catalogued close to a thousand photos, though that is a relatively small number compared to the grand total.
On an unrelated note, I was given the responsibility of
finding a permanent storage solution for framed portraits and paintings
in the vault. The framed collection was hung on peg board, but it
gave in and fell down early in my internship. As of yesterday, they
were being stored on the ground, leaning up against the wall. Not
a good way to store them. Due to the heavy rain we got last week, the
vault flooded (thankfully there was minimal damage), but today, my
proposed storage solution was implemented and installed. I suggested
that a more durable storage method would be chicken wired panels to get
the paintings off of the ground and hung out of harms way.
At the very end of July, We took down our Unionville exhibit in order to assemble our next exhibit: Trains and the Development of Talbot County. There were two major railroad lines that passed through Talbot County. The Baltimore and Eastern Rail Road went from Baltimore to Ocean City, while the Pennsylvania Rail Road went from Clayton, DE to Oxford, MD. We had a wealth of photos, artifacts, and information to put on display in a limited amount of space, but the exhibit turned out wonderful and a kick-off event will be held this Saturday, which I'll be attending and will later blog about.
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