MA Museum Studies Placement Week 5-6

I have now completed another two weeks of the placement it is crazy to think how quickly this has gone. During week 5 I was slowly getting through more cataloguing and re-boxing and fixing small mistakes I had made within the catalogue.

The art of writing proper descriptions is a bit tricky to pick up. The real struggle was realizing that my current normal writing style was not compatible with writing descriptions, so I had to change to accommodate this different way of writing. After I had figured out how to do proper descriptions it has been a lot easier, but I still go back through previous descriptions to make sure I fix any typos or other errors.

Also, during week 5 I have been slowly fleshing out the idea for the exhibition. I have settled on the theme of the publishing process and how that is shown in the Rose Griffiths collection. The overall aim of the exhibition is to show off the new catalogue and items and to be an educational tool for people who want to know more about the basic publication process. So far, I have just written some basic text and started to pick out items I wanted to use in the exhibition. I was also trained on the Omeka site software which is the software that is used here to publish online exhibitions. That is the end of everything I did in week 5. 

I have finished the basic catalogue!

During this week as well, I have been going through moving stuff around and fixing errors and mistakes within the items and descriptions. I have also started putting together the online exhibition. The longest part of this process is going to be inputting all the necessary objects into the catalogue.

The start of the process has me taking pictures of each individual item and then uploading them to the computer. After that I then I must upload them to the Omeka site and put in a few key pieces of information on each item so that when the exhibition is live visitors can find the items in the online catalogue easily. Finally, the last and hardest part is arranging the items in a thoughtful way to ensure that each contributes some meaning to each page.

The pages are divided through the publication process and show how the archive of Rose Griffiths demonstrates each step with assorted items, photographs, and objects from the collection. The site is a bit demanding and has a rigid structure which cannot be changed too easily unfortunately. However, working with this problem I have hopefully produced an exhibition that people will enjoy and learn a little about the publication process from it. It is hard to believe that the next two weeks will be my last here at the archives, but I still have one more post to say how everything ends up.