Reflection on Internship

     I came into this semester after being out of college for nearly 4 years. In the time spent out of college, I I focused on developing vocational skills to bridge my scholarly interests and my desire to do field work in preservation. Taking the time to reflect on my work while completing the requirements for the internship has allowed me to be more connected with the work I do. Despite the exciting nature of my work, it's still a 9-5 job. The general rigors of construction, early mornings, working in terrible weather, wear on a person. However, being able to record and share information about the work has been an exciting and engaging prospect. I hope to be able to share more challenges and triumphs of projects I engage in going forward with more likeminded colleagues. 

    The hardest part about this internship has been time management between the other courses. As I said before, this is my returning semester to college, as well as my last, so I am out of practice when it comes to college work. Due to poor planning on my part, I never completed my lab course requirement and was only able to get into a GES lab course. Working on the internship simultaneously with three other courses proved to be more work than I expected. Despite this, I'm thankful for the Public History department to allow my current job at Hestia Restoration to be included in the internship. Mathew Benning, the owner and my boss at Hestia, wants to establish a link between the history department at UMBC as a potential option for more interns. I believe it would be an exciting learning experience for both us at Hestia and the students willing to get their hands dirty doing some real restoration!

Reflecting On My First Internship Experience

Last week, my internship at the B&O Railroad Museum concluded and it has been a long journey of many different types of experiences, good, bad, ugly, and insightful. It showed me what it is that curators do on a day-to-day basis as well as the difficulties of being an intern in the public history field today. My internship at the B&O Railroad Museum has helped me build up my existing skills and learn practical skills that will help me for future internships and professional opportunities.

In my freshman year for a first-year seminar course, I wrote a final paper that focused on a career path I want to pursue after college, its job market and salary, educational requirements, and what does it mean to do that job. From that paper, I had an inkling of curatorial work being 90% office work, a percentage of exhibition development, and a percentage of networking for the department, museum, and object acquisition. And through my internship it has turned out to be pretty accurate and more intensive for the intern as much of the office work gets given to you and the more hands on, developmental tasks to the museum’s curatorial team. The human labor aspect of both groups ultimately comes together for a final project but it’s underestimated how much of being a curator is behind the scenes, and rather boring. I am hopeful I can have a career as a curator that I can make it my own or feel like it’s my own within its constraints.

Coming into my internship I had experience writing labels and doing research for labels. This internship put these skills to the test and put into perspective the sometimes specific or niche information that certain museums require for their label information. I had more experience with artwork labels which allow for a more flexible description of the artwork as it can take on many different forms depending on what you want to focus on (formal qualities, the artist, art movement, theme, relationships, etc.). At the B&O Railroad Museum where it focuses on B&O railroad history and railroad history in general that luxury is limited as history and object context are more important. It was a task to get used to as researching information and understanding it to put it into label form was challenging for me as someone with little prior knowledge of railroads, art specific material culture experience, and where to look for information I am lacking with to help clarify the label’s information. The Assistant Curator was able to guide me through the process that was more aligned with history and material culture research, label writing, and questioning to uncover and better understand a method of working with (non-art) objects that can succeed in various contexts.

Overall, my internship at the B&O Railroad Museum has been a challenge and a fruitful experience that has strengthened my skills in writing, research, and exhibition development through my projects with the upcoming B&O no. 3316 “Washington,” the American Freedom Train (AFT) exhibit, and other smaller side projects with object descriptions, accessing archival materials, and cleaning up existing exhibits in the museum. This is an experience that I would not have had if not for blindly applying to a museum outside of my field of study and emphasizing my prior skills I built up through course work at UMBC and in my study abroad program. And I have walked away with a valuable memory, experience, and opportunity to add to my resume.

The Elusive Mural of the B&O no.3316 "Washington"

Courtesy of B&O Railroad Museum

 As a continuation from the previous post and after that specific research task for the B&O no.3316 “Washington” observation-lounge car, I was given my next assignment that was by many staff members at the B&O Railroad Museum called a “wild goose chase.” This post will outline my experience with this assignment and the interesting outcomes of it.

The B&O no. 3316 “Washington” has an Art Deco inspired lounge that fits into the modern art period the car was made within (built in 1949) and has a main wall feature, a photomural. In the front end of the no. 3316’s lounge is a photomural—a large scale print of a photograph on a wall, usually colored—of cherry blossoms at Tidal Basin in Washington DC. The photo is a perfect shot of the basin, the Washington Monument, the cherry blossoms across the water and their branches over the frame. Railroad fans know of the cherry blossom mural in the “Washington” but it is a relatively unknown fact online as information to find anything about it is non-existent. The B&O Railroad Museum’s archives have photographs and information around the context of the piece but do not know who made it.

So, my assignment from the Assistant Curator was to find out additional information about the photomural but especially who made it. Before me there were two-three attempts from staff members and an intern which made this task daunting if not impossible hence my start to a wild goose chase. I chose to instead look at it as a treasure hunt to be more optimistic, and this optimism paid off as I found a singular article from 1949 by the Railway Age Magazine that described the specific details of the new B&O “Columbian” trains at the time and a partial list of companies and businesses that helped different aspects of the train cars. Each car of the “Colombian” has a mural for a major sightseeing location in the cities they stop at. These murals were done by the Kaufmann & Fabry Co. a Chicago based photography studio who are best known for their photographs of the Chicago’s “Century of Progress” World Fair in 1933. It’s an intriguing connection between innovation and railroads that could only be made by the existence of these murals.

In light of the discovery, I had the opportunity to write drafts of the label to be used for the no. 3316’s “Unlocked Series” which felt like a reward and an honor to be given the chance to do. I wrote around four labels for different points of emphasis: some art history, some historical context, for the middle schooler, for the railfan, and by the request of the Assistant Curator one for myself which felt like it was against my training around labels (a motto “It’s for others not you!”). I focused on the process of making a photomural from photograph to wall decoration which further connected me to the time period the “Washington” was made in. I am looking forward to seeing the final label with the cherry blossom mural.

The Good, The Bad, and The Brittle: My Battle with 19th-Century Diaries and Boxes of Bureaucracy

    For my internship at Loyola Notre Dame Library, I processed over forty different collections varying in size, subject matter, and dates. The oldest and smallest collection both happened to be the Adelia M. Hall diaries collection. This collection consisted of two small personal diaries from a female evangelical who traveled the world in the mid-nineteenth century. The diaries had small news clippings and letters held within the pages from her travels. This collection required a lot of preservation precautions as well as some translation and transcription work. The preservation precautions were to prevent further damage to the almost two century old leather binding of the diaries. I used gloves when handling the diaries and was extremely careful with each individual page in order to keep from ripping or bending the pages. Unfortunately, over the course of the travels and the years in storage, the diaries had seen much better days. The leather was beginning to crumble and the pages were extremely brittle. Much of the news clippings and some of the entries were in Spanish. Since I know an extremely small amount of Spanish, I had to work hard to transcribe the Spanish and then translate it to English in order to understand the subject matter of some of the entries and the news clippings. 

The largest collection was the Notre Dame University Curriculum Committee records. This collection was the most frustrating and obnoxious collection I processed. Not only was it extremely large (roughly fourteen boxes if I remember correctly), but there was an immense number of duplicate materials scattered throughout the collection. I had to go through everything and separate the documents based on date and type (meeting minutes, proposals, finalized curriculum, etc.) and then go through each pile to weed out the duplicates and recycle any copies. The LNDL Archives policy was that items only needed a maximum of two copies in the collections (unless otherwise decided by the Head of the Archives, Jenny). The only reason we would keep more than two copies would be if there were valuable and varying notes taken on different copies and the notes were worth saving. Many of the items (specifically the meeting minutes) had dozens of unnecessary copies. We recycled A LOT of paper while I processed this collection. We also had a slight delay in the processing of this collection because of two reasons. The first being that the air conditioning in the building went out so we brought out the fans to cool us down and they immediately blew a few of my piles around and I had to redo a small section of the collection. The second (and most annoying) was that seemingly almost every other collection had a couple of items that needed to be moved to this collection. Even after I finished the collection, either myself or one of the other interns would find meeting minutes or proposals or something else that should have been a part of the Curriculum Committee records and I would have to dig out the boxes again and find where the items went (many of which we discovered were copies and just needed to be recycled). While my supervisor, Jenny, complimented me on my speediness and effectiveness of the processing of this collection, it felt like it would never end. 

Lastly, the most interesting collection I processed was the Scrapbook Collection. It was composed of about a dozen different personal scrapbooks made by either students or faculty of the different universities. The scrapbooks were adorable and incredibly interesting to look at. The old photos and ephemera put in the books were so fun to go through. I really enjoyed this collection. 

Polishing off my Internship!

 

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!

An awesome picture of Branemark wearing a cowboy hat with a sword!

 

History for All

 

An example of the new silhouette figures that illustrate activities performed by enslaved people at Riversdale House.

In the past year that I have been involved with Riversdale House Museum, I have had opportunities to participate in conversations about the museum’s future and even witness firsthand some of the changes the museum has made to move towards more inclusive interpretation. 

In recent years, increased attention has been given to the way slavery shaped the history of this country. Riversdale’s tour content and interpretive signage generally focused on the white inhabitants of the property, the Stier-Calvert family, and the many expensive furnishings with which they decorated the home. Meanwhile, the tour and interpretive content gave only a passing mention to the enslaved men and women whose efforts allowed the Stier-Calverts to lead their opulent lifestyle. 

In the time since I began working at Riversdale, the sequence of the tour has been rearranged in a way that reflects the museum’s commitment to highlighting African-American history. The tour now begins in an outbuilding referred to as the dependency, where stories of enslaved residents are discussed in depth. Previously, the dependency was the final portion of the tour, at which point visitors’ willingness to engage had often diminished, having already seen the “main attraction” of the house itself. 

Additionally, the museum recently installed wooden silhouette figures throughout the house which depict enslaved people and the tasks they might have carried out on a typical day. Since there is little written documentation about what the daily lives of the enslaved men and women of Riversdale could have looked like, these silhouette figures help visitors envision what their roles might have been. In this way, the figures reinforce the fact that enslaved individuals were essential in shaping the story of Riversdale as we know it. 

 

There is still much more work to be done, with many more changes planned or in the process of being planned. I hope to continue assisting Riversdale in providing the public with an interpretation of its history in a way that is inclusive of all the voices who were part of the story.

Trials, Tribulation, and Transcription

 When working at a historic house museum, one can generally expect to encounter a large number of primary source documents relating to the inhabitants of the house. Riversdale House Museum is no exception, and its most notable residents, the Stier-Calverts, were such meticulous correspondents that museum staff continues to transcribe and digitize the family’s many letters today, more than a century and a half after they were originally written. I have been fortunate enough to assist with the transcription of some of these documents, and have experienced a whirlwind of emotions, many of which would not be appropriate to describe in this blog. 

Transcription is defined as the act of transcribing, or making a written copy of words. I assumed this part of my job would be a piece of cake. I’ve been making written copies of words since I was in the first grade, right? Wrong. Horribly, horribly, wrong. Transcription of historic documents is incredibly difficult, frustrating, and leads to false hope when you think you have correctly interpreted the word only to realize you are wrong, still. The handwriting of the nineteenth century can vary wildly from what we are used to. I will include below an example of one of the documents I was able to partially transcribe before I handed it into my supervisor to give the finishing touches.

This document is a note dated January 13, 1862,  from “Jackson Brother & Co.,” addressed to Charles Benedict “C. B.” Calvert, the son of George Calvert and Rosalie Stier Calvert. 

What I was able to decipher:

“Hon. C. B. Calvert, 

Please…for two, or three… on a/e of any note due…

Give this your usual prompt attention if you please… will oblige very Resfy Jackson”

The complete text:

“Hon. C. B. Calvert,

Dr Sir

Please send us a check for two, or three hundred dollars, on a/c of note due us.

Give this your usual prompt attention if you please.

And oblige

Very Respy yrs

Jackson Brother & Co.”

As you can see, I was able to interpret a good chunk of this letter, but was missing some key bits of information that tell us what the letter was about. Surprise, surprise, it was about money. Some things never change.