Blog 3: Final Reflection on BMI Internship

Internship with the Baltimore Museum of Industry - Summer 2021

Claire Brocato

November 11th, 2021, was my last day at the BMI. I was sad to say goodbye, but I was grateful for everything I learned while interning there. When I first had an informational interview with the BMI, they said that every day in the Collection Department looked different, and I learned that was definitely true. Over the five months I worked there, I learned about cataloging, researching, conservation, inventory, and much more. In terms of cataloging, finding my way around the software, PastPerfect, seemed to have the biggest learning curve. I was still discovering new aspects of the software up to my last day. However, I was able to catalog thirteen accessions over the course of my internship before switching to working on inventories, and I believe it is important to mention that accessions often have more than one object within them. In terms of conducting inventories, I learned that it requires a great deal of organization, but I also learned that it is a much bigger project than a five-month internship can really tackle.

While at the BMI, I began an inventory for zone one of the Bakery, and I worked on processing objects at the warehouse. Both were daunting tasks because the BMI has thousands of objects that have not yet been inventoried or organized. It would take a team of people years of daily work to go through everything, so it makes sense that I was only really able to dip my toes into the inventory work. However, that was something I wish was different about my internship and about the museum industry in general. I wish there was a better way of organizing everything, a better way of getting funding for everything, and a better way of paying people to work in museums. The collections management book I read had a great deal of information about the importance of taking care of each item, but it is not currently possible to do that at many museums because they do not have the funding. Additionally, to find out what object was what, I had to do a considerable amount of research in the PastPerfect software. Sometimes I could find the object, and sometimes I was not able to find it because it was never added to the software. That was often unsatisfying, but it was simply part of the job.

In the end, the opportunity to work with the BMI to learn more about collections management was an incredibly edifying experience. It confirmed my desire to work in museums for my future career, and more specifically, it confirmed my desire to work with collections over other areas of the museum field. At the start of my internship, I had thought about going into exhibition design or archives, but for now at least, I would like to continue to focus on collections management. Some aspects of the field I would still like to learn about though are conservation and grant writing. I loved learning about how to resort and seal rusted metal using wax, so I would like to discover even more conservation techniques in the future.