Traveling Talleys
Talley Your Adventure
New exhibits/AMA Conference
Hello bloggers! Welcome back!
Today at the Clinton Library, we started the process of breaking down the Peanuts exhibit and boxing it up in beautiful storage units to send on to the new museum which will showcase the exhibit. It’s a long process, and most of the process consists of pulling objects from the wall, carefully boxing them up, and making sure that each item goes back in its appropriate box safely. Inventory is a big part of this job, as well as evaluation. We don’t want to be sending broken objects to the next facility without at least warning them in advance! Things like that do happen – we did have to ask for a new picture because the one that was sent to us was broken, but that doesn’t mean we need to do the same in reverse. Sometimes thing get damaged in shipping, which is out of our control (to a point), but still! So, we spent the entire day boxing every item up and bringing them downstairs to wait for the movers to arrive. Now that the items are moved, the facility itself can go in and repaint the walls and make the place look clean and new for the next exhibit! If you want to read more on the last exhibit, click here and read all about it!
Next will be an exhibit on Dinosaurs! I cannot wait! They are going to be interactive as well, so be prepared for excitement! When we start putting up that exhibit, rest assure I will be there helping as well as taking pictures and showcasing them here on this site. So don’t stop reading this blog yet!
In addition to switching out the temporary exhibits, I also was fortunate enough to receive a scholarship and travel stipend 
from the Arkansas Museum Association to attend their annual meeting and conference. While I was there, I also learned a lot about not only paper objects, but how to present your site as well. First off, paper. Nikki Senn, a fellow graduate student and wonderful 
preservationist, taught us how to test water solubility in paper as well as how to properly (on a beginner level) preserve paper and the intricacies of working with paper. Wow, I learned so much! It’s amazing what an hour session will teach you! Test of water solubility ALL THE TIME, and make sure you are properly storing your paper. Sometimes, you don’t even realize that you are actually hurting the paper. I will have to scan some of the documents she passed out for more reference to what she taught us, but it was an amazing start to the conference.
After this class, I went to the collections management session and learned about storage of large and bulky items, the proper way of labeling and how to number your collections. That was also a good lesson, but I also realized that there are so many ways to do all of this. It’s amazing that even though museums have been around for centuries, museum people are still in debate about how to label, store, and arrange artifacts. I think that while this may seem counter productive and a little chaotic, it also makes me feel better experimenting (to a degree!) on different ways to work in a museum. The more information that is passed around, the more we all learn in the museum world!
The last class that I found most relevant was how to make your historic site feel like you are in that time period, while actually being in 2015. It’s amazing the way that overcrowding in cities will influence your historic site and it may also take away the lessons you want to teach to your visitors. This class taught us how to incorporate the different atmospheres and updates around your site so that you still can bring them back to the 1800’s or even later, while acknowledging the fact that it is actually 2015. It was a great conference! Thanks, Joseph, for these pictures!
Stay tuned for more on our new temporary exhibit!!
Traveling Talleys 