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February 26, 2008
ASB DC, Day Two
Hello from ASB!
Two days down and three to go for my five-day engagement at the Smithsonian Museum of American History! DC is a good twenty degrees warmer than Michigan, so even through it’s February, I still feel like I’m on vacation in some tropical clime, where flipflops and sunscreen are more important than my laptop and notebooks.
There are four of us working on processing the Naff collection, which is good because its HUGE! We spent a good chuck of the first day rehousing photographs, which can be pretty boring work except for the whole part where you get to look through 100 years of family photos from dozens of families you’ve never met. For every cute baby or wedding picture, there was something completely bizarre, like a hula dancer at a church social or snapshots of the aftermath of a Druze rebellion in 1925. Then we moved onto a very broadly defined series of “personal papers” which basically contained every piece of paper donated by these families-poems, newspaper clippings, letters, naturalization papers, you name it. Some are completely in Arabic, so we have to trust that the historian who collected all of these materials correctly and comprehensively labeled them in English (which is not always the case).
Our supervisors have done a wonderful job of working in specific learning opportunities into our practical processing experiences. Each day at lunch a different staff member gives a talk while we eat. Today a music archivist showed us clips and talked about musicians and how their styles can be affected by changing technology and media, from television to digital sampling. Very cool stuff. Also, as we run into preservation needs, such as specialized rehousing, they teach us all how to create these items. Today we made “sink mats” to hold fragile glass negatives. Mine was particularly conservation-tastic, if I do say so myself.
There are so many things to do in the city, it can be tempting to go explore every night. Luckily, the hotel has wifi and I’m tired enough to be perfectly happy doing homework in my hotel room while the city bustles below. Our hotel is right Capitol Hill area (only three blocks from the Mall) and so there’s always something going on below us. I’m a heavy sleeper who likes cities, so I’m pretty much in heaven right now.
I’ll try to write more in a few days, to give you the full view of my Alternative Spring Break experience. Until then, g’night!
-Megan
Posted by messelti at February 26, 2008 10:18 PM