a bland but necessary introduction to interning

as a bit of a reference point, i’m retroactively recounting my first few weeks as an intern at the athens county historical society and museum. i first got involved with ahs this past winter, when i volunteered to help plan a civil war ball fund-raiser; i loved it so much that i decided to pursue an internship for this fall.

i spend most of my days working through the collections boxes with the other interns. ahs has been renumbering and reorganizing everything, and i have such a small part in this huge plan. 

i’m have to learn how to be more careful and aware of what my hands are doing. these items, if i drop them or rip them or even touch them without wearing gloves, could so easily be destroyed. even the donation ledgers are old and crumbly! it's a bit scary and intimidates me from approaching items sometimes. i’m not used to such caution ... but this must be second-nature if i want to work with artifacts.

the idea of de-accessioning items seems a little strange to me. if something is numbered, no matter what it is, it must go through a process of being removed from the collection. we have a pile full of bottles with hazardous, decades-old liquids in them, envelopes, boxes, and moldy things that shouldn’t be kept in close contact with other items. but, at the same time, some things that i think should be kept aren’t. i found an edition of the athens messenger from 1935, which i thought was amazing, and i spent a good half hour just flipping through the pages. but it didn’t contain the article that the label had said it did, the museum has a better-preserved copy, and it wasn’t accessioned, so we were planning to get rid of it. i managed to convince jessica (the curator) to give it to me though — awesome prize for a journalism/anthropology major, if i do say so myself. but this is just one of many examples that i have seen so far. maybe it’s the future archaeologist in me crying out that junk is not necessarily garbage, but i hate seeing things going into that pile.

on a similar note, i’ve noticed that my dust allergies are bringing a complication into the equation by prompting me to sneeze at inconvenient moments.

officially, one of my primary jobs is to work on a large collection of native american points. the student who worked on this before me met with me to explain how she learned to sort and identify thousands of points from across the continental u.s. she has traveled to meet with experts and worked with donald, a volunteer with a lot of previous experience, to identify unusual artifacts. i’m a bit intimidated by this project, and maybe that’s one of the reasons why i haven’t worked with it much, yet. i do hope i get over that ... in any case, this would be awesome exposure to archaeology before i apply to a field school for next summer.

i’ve helped to build an exhibit already, too! a photo exhibit of the social movements of the 1960’s was compiled and designed by one of the interns, and we put it up a week ago. i even learned how to shoot a staple gun.

all in all, i love this!