Wordle = Amazing

If you have not yet tried out Wordle, it is a great way to kill some time. Here is the Wordle I created for my blog. It is neat to see some of the words I use the most, they are the biggest!

Living it up, 1845 style

Today began my adventure as a historic interpreter at The Farmer's Museum. It was absolutely wonderful to be back "in the field", working at a museum and getting the chance to speak with visitors again. To top everything off, this 1845 New York museum makes their brooms very, very differently than my old 1875 Iowa museum does. I'm not sure if its a time period thing, a regional thing or if it is just that the first particular broommakers at each museum did things a little differently. I am absolutely fascinated as to why these differences have occured, and if there is a reason behind them. Never fear though, I am in the process of conducting research on the side in an attempt to find out any logic behind this.

Also, this week I was elected as the leader for our semester class project. We will be providing the Oneonta World of Learning with a feasibility study, as they are hoping to open a bricks and mortar museum. I think this will be a great chance to step away from the public side of museums to see what it actually takes to put one together, and I am very excited to help all of the voices of my classmates channel their ideas into one coherant message. Updates will follow!

Adelphi Custom and Historic Wallpaper Hangings

Today for our Material Cultures class, we visited Adelphi, a reproduction block-printing wallpaper company. It was really interesting seeing how they can take scraps of wallpaper found from the inside of some old walls and turn it into a fully reproduced, vibrantly colored pattern. It is actually quite a small, labor intensive process but it was fascinating to see. We also got the chance to talk to The Anonymous Bookbinder, a man whose office is up one floor from Adelphi who restores the bindings on books. It wasn't a process I had every really thought about, and was absolutely fascinating. I'm really interested to continue my journal for Material Cultures, in which we're examining different printed materials. Tomorrow I'm going to the storage facility to examine some wallpaper remnants. Its really wonderful, and is very interesting to compare to the wallpapers at the Farmer's Museum and back at Living History Farms.

In other news, I have been hired as an Interpreter at the Broom Shop for The Farmer's Museum. Ginny, one of my roommates, and I went in to talk to them about volunteering. Ginny is very interested in textiles, and wants to learn how to spin and weave. They set her up as a volunteer, but they were really in need of a broommaker so they hired me. I spent Monday going through the paperwork and research left from their old broommaker, which was pretty messy. While I was in office, they received unfortunate news that one of their textile interpreters will be unable to come back for the rest of the season due to an injury. While that is horrible news for the poor woman, it is good news for Ginny, who will now join me as a staff member at the Farmer's Museum.

The biggest challenge for me is going to be learning how to make this particular style of brooms. Both museums form the interior of their brooms differently, and the Farmer's Museum brings the top of the broomcorn down to the handle, whereas Living History Farms cuts the top of the broomcorn flat across. I'm really interested to do more research and find out why it is these differences exist. The Farmers Museum is 1840-1860 New York, LHF is 1875 Iowa. Is it time period, is it region? I've got a giant stack of research I'm only a little way through, but maybe the answer is there somewhere!

Not related to museum's, but still very very interesting

http://hnn.us/articles/117140.html

MacGyver

Part of being a graduate student is being able to take ideas and present them in new, unique ways. If you've read past posts, you'll remember the project we were assigned during orientation week. We were given clues on notecards and told to figure out what the clue was talking about, then to take those people and place and include them in a video that also advertised Cooperstown and the Graduate Program. This is what we came up with, I hope you like it! Click here, or watch it below!

Are We Disconnected?

Tonight my roommate Ginny and I were sitting having dinner, and we got into a really great discussions about the current situation of museums in the world. She told me about a video she had run across on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFbmuEUdwI, which is a very slow moving but interesting commentary on one opinion about the museum world. While satirical, it gives a good jolt to those of us being educated as the next group of museum professionals. Though I would argue strongly against the need to put a museum into a box, it is true that we guide visitors by choosing certain objects to display, writing and desiging exhibits and plaques for individual objects. I am curious as to what others feel about this. Is it the job of a museum curator or educator to guide a visitor? Should exhibits be set up with only the most basic framework, allowing visitors to travel through and interpret without guidance? And are museum professionals, as college educated and beyond, unable to identify with the general public, most of whom do not have masters degrees?

Ginny and I were also discussing the difficulties of living history museums and the application of this question. In living history, there is a very strong interpretation of the history being presented. That is why those people who wear period clothing and talk to visitors are called "interpreters". Is this the right way of presenting history to the public? Or are we cutting ourselves off to other possibilities by giving interpreters or docents a set script to work off of?

I don't have a good answer to this one. If anyone does, I'd love to hear it. Our first year class is getting geared up to help the Oneonta World of Learning discuss their plans for a building for their museum, and this is one of the issues we as a class are trying to tackle. What do you think?

Visitor Services

It is always nice to have your ideas confirmed. I've always been a very strong advocate for living history style museums, or outdoor/open air museums. Although I was originally not going to be able to take the class because it was scheduled at the same time as our Research and Fieldwork course, but because I wanted to take it as well as a number of other first years, they rescheduled the class so we can take it now! The book that was our first reading is called Life Stages of the Museum Visitor, by Wilkening and Chung. We read the first three chapters for class last week, and they talked about the different age groups that visit museums, including a breakdown of the different generations and what experiences have shaped their lives. One of my favorite parts was a breakdown of what exactly visitors want in outdoor museums. The top responses were for interactive, engaging interpretations and demonstrations from workers in period clothing...exactly the way I have worked for the last three seasons, and what I believe to be one of the most effective ways of connecting with visitors of all ages. Yay!

Things Always Happen For a Reason

In February 2008 I was home from Wartburg for our break. I was on my way to Michigan to see three of the friends who I had studied in France with. On my way out to my car, I hit the remaining tiny patch of ice on my driveway, slipped, and fell backwards onto my back. I threw my left arm back to catch myself, and landed pretty squarely onto my left shoulder, hard enough that I went back inside to have my veterinarian mother take a look. True, dogs and people are built differently, but a broken bone is a broken bone and I was worried. She didn't see anything wrong, so I grabbed an ice pack and drove to Michigan. That was the start of what has been over a year and a half of doctors visits, tests, injections and frustration. I started experiencing pain in my shoulder and arm in March, a month after my fall, and began visiting doctors. Unfortunately, my diagnosis remained elusive until June of this year, which meant a frustrating and less than involved senior year at Wartburg and many long, painful nights. In June, after being told my only option was to implant electrodes into my spinal column as a pain management technique and still without an official and correct diagnosis, my mother and I flew to Colorado to see a doctor out there. Three doctors and an expensive change of flights later, I finally had a diagnosis; subscapular bursitis and scapular dyskinesia with nerve damage down my left arm. Throughout the summer, I saw a physical therapist near my hometown and have seen a 60% improvement in a very short time.

Unfortunately, having just moved across the country, I have not yet had the opportunity to meet with a new physcial therapist. The earliest available appointment for the pt clinic in town is the 23rd. In the meantime I have a number of stretches and exercises I can do, but within the last three days I have seen a marked downturn. That all culminated this morning with me getting sick from the pain in my neck while we were being introduced to the Milne Library in Oneonta.

This is an aspect of my graduate education that I would much prefer to do without. During the late spring and early summer, before going to Colorado, I was very uncertain as to whether I would be able to attend the program this fall. Having seen such an improvement this summer was reassuring, and I had hoped that it would not be an issue once classes started. Unfortunately that is not the case, but rest assured I will do all I can to prevent any other flare-ups and to remain ahead with my classwork.

On a different note, there has been some good that has come out of this. Throughout my life I have been blessed enough to be fairly healthy. This last year and a half, though, has exposed me to aspects of the museum world that I had not thought about before. Simple things, like ensuring that doors can easily be opened. Sometimes, if I'm carrying things in my right arm and am faced with a turn knob door, I have to wait for help or set down my load and figure out how to get through it before it closes again.

This has sparked an interest in issues of accesibilty in museums, especially in living history museums. How do museums accomedate handicap visitors? Is there a "favor" to a certain type of handicap, i.e. wheelchair bound, visually impaired, etc? What services are museums providing for mentally handicapped and learning impaired visitors? This topic is one that I am considering strongly for a thesis idea. If I decide on another topic, at the very least it is something I would like to explore and to ensure that whatever museum I work at aims to improve.

First Day

Although for the last two weeks we have met as a group, today is our first official day of classes with the first seesion of our material cultures course. Our reading for the day was "What is Print", a brief but thorough intoduction to several different processess through which prints are made.

During my time at Living History Farms, I worked in the 1875 Print Shop for a short time. I hope that, going into today's class, I have a good working knowledge of at least the basics of print making, though job and newspaper printing is quite different from art printing I am sure.

This afternoon we will continue our task of editing our class video project. If you read earlier, you saw that during Orientation Week we were all given cards containing phrases or names. Our task was to identify the person, place or thing referenced on the card, then to put together a video advertising the Cooperstown Graduate Program and the town of Cooperstown as well. Our project is coming together quite nicely. I am on the editing crew, and we're getting into our second big round of editing. Sunday afternoon we met as well and spent a solid five and half hours working on the introduction and importing the film. It has been a really interesting experience, and something I have never done with quite as much depth. In high school, I made commercials for the French and Drama clubs, but that was quite awhile ago. The process seems to have become much more technical over the years, but I am very glad to have the opportunity to learn how it works. Mandy, who is one of my roommates, has worked extensively with the History Day project in Minnesota, and comes to us with a great deal of experience in all things film. Once our project is complete, we will present it to the NYSHA staff as well as post it to youtube. I will include a link to the clip here!

Research Week

This last week we spent almost entirely with Will Walker, the history professor on our staff. He teaches Research and Fieldwork to all of the first years, and we also have the option of taking his American Cultures course. We spent the majority of our time getting acquainted with those resources that will be available to us. Because our building is under construction, we are currently being housed in the New York State Historical Association (or, NYSHA), specifically in their library. We are also in close proximity to the Feminore Art Museum (http://fenimoreartmuseum.blogspot.com/) and the Farmer's Museum (http://thefarmersmuseum.blogspot.com/), both of which are right next door.We are are also affiliated with the Oneonta campus, and have an in with another nearby university. This means that we have access to a tremendous amount of resources. We were introduced to the variety of collections stored in the Library, which includes letters written and signed between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. I actually got to touch them!! We also have an extensive photography and Native American collection at the Fenimore Art Museum, as well as an amazingly diverse collection between Fenimore and the Farmers museum stored off site in a converted stable. There they have a collection of everything from quilts and clothing to presidential life masks. I'm so excited to get the chance to explore the material culture side of things; that starts next week with my material cultures class.

Though we did set aside our research on Wednesday to get a quick introduciton to the subject with our prof, but the primary purpose was, in fact, research. To check that we were absorbing the information we were being given, we were issued "Research Challenges". Our first task, the prison assignment I described in an earlier post, went pretty well. We also were given an assigment, as I briefly described earlier, in which we were supposed to choose a historic marker and research the event which it describes. The marker that Mandy and I had was about the Cherry Valley "Masacre", an attack by the British and Native American troops.

Well, I'll try to write more later, but we're having a "Last Chance to Wear White" party, and there's still work to do before people come over!

A Quick Assignment

Think about whatver historical markers you have in your area. Who are they about? What do they actually say? Do they give the full story of what really happened? We had a research assignment where we examined New York historic markers and found most of them lacking. I'll add more about this later!

Waltz with Bashir

If you have never seen the documentary film Waltz with Bashir, I highly, highly recommend you see it. It is an animated documentary detailing an Israeli man's attempt to remember his involvement in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in September of 1982. The overall Palestinian-Israeli conflict is something I have had the chance to study on multiple occasions during my career, including touching on it in multiple history and international relations courses at Wartburg and spending an entire semester on the topic during my time in Nantes, France.

The goal of having us watch the film was not necessarily to educate us more about the subject itself, but to show us how fickle memory can be. The main character has no memory of the incident himself, and so attempts to learn details from those he believed may have been there with him. The whole idea of the changing nature of a memory makes for some frustration for those attempting to conduct interviews in oral history, which we will be doing later this semester.

Overall though, it is a darkly moving film that I recommend watching on a day when it is okay to be sad and more than a little shaken up after the viewing. As to how tricky my own research in oral history will prove, only time will tell.