In my 21st week at the Mayme A. Clayton Library
and Museum, I received more direction on my exhibit, discussed the collection
hierarchy, and took responsibility for another history undergraduate intern.
The Audio Assault
exhibit continues to be an exercise in unlocking the curator’s imagination. On
the positive side of the equation, my narrative is becoming much more intuitive
to me. I can clearly express what I want the visitor to experience at each
section of the exhibit. When I came to work on Tuesday, I went about measuring
the space to determine if the content that I had selected would be sufficient to
populate the walls. I haven’t taken a math class in a decade but my
calculations left me feeling like I needed more content. I brought my concern
to Larry and he told me that I did not need to crowd the walls to get a message
across; 3-4 powerful images or quotes would give the desired effect. The better
question was if I was satisfied with the quality of my selections, rather than
the quantity. For example, I want the beginning of the exhibit to demonstrate
how the tension between the races was mounting in the mid to late 60’s and I currently
had some portrait images of Medgar Evers and students picketing. A person would
have to know that Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway and non-violent protesters were met with fire hoses and attack dogs to get the message, the
imagery should make the sentiment more obvious to the viewer. It is my task to
consult more items in the collection, and see if someone besides me could
understand the perspective that I am trying to illustrate. Other topics that we
discussed were the manipulation of images to make people step back and take
something in or lean in closer to read something smaller. All of these
techniques and strategies will have to be employed to give people a dynamic
Black Power experience in the hallway of this de-commissioned courthouse.
On Saturday, two of my favorite museum worker bees, Greta
and Eric, came in to talk about the Online Archive of California and how materials
were organized within the archive. I like working with Greta and Eric because they
both have graduate degrees in library science with a concentration in archives
and we tend to speak the same language about the status of the collections. As
Greta and Eric have been working through our catalog and trying to determine
which collections are ready for upload to OAC, they have come across entries
that don’t seem to meet the criteria of a traditional candidate for collection
level description (finding aids). For example, there is a woman who donated a
cookie jar to the museum, I’m not sure what the historical significance was,
but it was accessioned by the staff at MCLM at some point. Should this item
have its own finding aid? Greta suggested that we have a general “artifacts”
collection and describe these random items from random donors at the item
level. Eric mentioned that sometimes one item could warrant its own collection
because we would not want to bury something significant like a signed first
edition copy of Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Things Religious and Moral” in the list
of book materials of a finding aid. Greta countered with the power of EAD and
the semantic web; anything that we upload on EAD will be fully searchable. If
you are looking for that special book, as long as the tag
reads the book’s title, and tag reads book, it will pop up
regardless of its status as an item in a series or the title of a collection. I
took in everything that they were saying and told them that there were many
ways to answer the questions; it was just going to take one person to make a
decision and get everyone on board with the reasoning. I’ve never had to generate
policies in an archival setting and as many examples as I consult, the decision has to be
the option that makes the most sense for MCLM. My work is definitely cut out
for me.
Throughout the week, Cara and I had been discussing what to
do with Kathy, the second history intern from UCLA. The first one, Susan, is helping
me with the Audio Assault exhibit.
Kathy has been bounced around at the museum for the past two Saturdays, helping
us to greet visitors and answer the phones. I knew that she needed something
more substantial to make her internship more valuable. On Friday afternoon, it occurred
to me to have her process the six linear feet that compose the Antoinette
Culpepper architecture collection. I have been intrigued by this collection
ever since I started working at MCLM. I found the six boxes while I was going
through Mayme’s papers and based on the art deco style block handwriting
contrasted with Mayme’s loopy cursive, and the persistent focus on buildings
and drawings, I knew that these materials did not belong with Mayme’s papers. To add to
the intrigue, MCLM has a “blueprint” collection that is only composed of
drawings from a firm with “Culpepper” in the title. There is very limited information
in the finding aid about the blueprint collection, so I think that Antoinette’s
files will add more of a context for that collection. Kathy has eight more
weeks with us, so I am going to supervise her processing of these architecture
records. On Saturday, I gave her a crash course archival methodology and told
her that we would go through it one step at a time, starting with a survey.
Based on her notes, she has a pretty good idea of how to identify the material
types, subjects, dates, and proper names that we might use to arrange and
describe the collection in the next step.
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