Towards the latter half and ending of my internship, I was left to manage the remaining boxes which consisted of patents, books, and many, many carousel slides. Technically, slides, photographs, film strips, and x-rays were considered objects, but I was given the task of going through these still since most were mixed in with documents.
This part was one of the most interesting parts of the entire internship, since these slides and images covered such a wide range of content. Most were images of surgeries that Branemark participated in, and I’m not usually a squeamish person but some of these images were unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Since osseointegration could be used not just in dentistry, but in restorative and plastic surgery in general, he helped people all over the world who had facial deformities, missing facial features, and missing limbs. I did end up seeing someone have their entire nose removed and replaced with a prosthetic, I can only assume due to the tissue being unsalvageable for a rhinoplasty, but an entire intact human nose just sitting on an operating tray is a crazy sight to see. Some people were missing nearly half their facial features, and had custom made prosthetics that could be removed and looked like a complete and normal face. I had never seen anything like it before!
I also loved seeing the random assortment of slides and photographs thrown in there of Branemark meeting with colleagues, the interiors of office buildings and conference halls from 20 or so years ago, nature pictures, and even just casual photos of Branemark with family and friends. There were even a couple of photos from a visit to Australia of Branemark and company hanging out with kangaroos! I found it really interesting that he kept so many tiny pieces that made up over half his entire life and his career in these binders, slides, and boxes, and that I was able to look through them and see a small part of who he was.
Along with these slides, photos, x-rays, and film strips were both handwritten and formal surgery plans and notes for each patient, which I also would go through one by one and digitize. The process for scanning film, slides, x-rays, and the like is different than documents, and I was simply told not to worry about digitizing those.
Once I finished with the boxes of slides and whatnot, I had the easy task of going through patents. Branemark had patented some of his osseointegrative bone anchored screws and other tools in around twenty-five different countries, and renewed them over the years, so I had a wide array of patents to go through. My supervisor and I ultimately decided that the best course of action would be again to create a chart with information on all these patents, with country of issue, year, etc. on it, and to rehouse the patents into protective slips within a binder.
My final tasks for this internship were to find places for this massive collection to go within the museum’s storage, and to create finding aids for everything. My finding aids went binder by binder essentially, with the binder title, year of creation, content overview, content language, some background on the collection, who had donated the collection, what legal restrictions may apply to the content, and where it was kept. Working on these while finding homes for everything turned out to be the best plan of attack and really helped me keep track of where everything ended up going.
I really enjoyed my time working with this collection! I worked with such a large scale collection full of interesting things, and I got to spend pretty much every day just hanging out with a friend of mine while we both worked together in our office. Also, the museum hosted multiple events with free food through the University of Baltimore Maryland, so I ate a lot of free cake and cookies throughout. Overall, I am so grateful I was able to continue to work within a collections setting, and be able to get more firsthand professional museum experience!
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| An awesome picture of Branemark wearing a cowboy hat with a sword! |
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