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.