Using Time and Throwing It Away
Hello, Readers!
To start off the week, I finally finished the condition report. I now have records keeping track of the initial conditions for 69 items in the gallery, and I took multiple photographs of each item so I can visualize any damage or deterioration. However, I faced an issue: I only had my phone to take the photographs, so that meant the quality of the images ended up being not the best. Additionally, I would sometimes appear in them because of the reflective glass of the frames, or a shadow would be cast from the angle of the lights.
My solution was just to stick with it. I talked with my mentor about it, and she said it will be okay since the photographs are only going to be used by the two of us as a reference in the future. As long as any damage or deterioration is documented, then it should be fine even with the bad quality of the images. So, while my condition report could potentially make professionals disappointed, I have done all that I could.
To include the images in the report, I had to transfer all the images from my phone to my laptop. Overall, there were 439 photos, and it took an hour and a half for them to all be uploaded and an additional hour to create individual folders and sort the images for each item.
After that, I helped my mentor organize some calendars. They were calendars showing the dates for all the events, exhibits, and tours that were related to the museum in a certain time frame, typically a year or a few months. The museum would send these calendars out to those with memberships so they could see what was going on at the museum and maybe plan a trip if they were interested. The archives collect and preserve them, and my mentor and I organized them by year. There were already folders filled with calendars, and some editions even had multiple duplicates. There was not enough space to keep all of the copies, so we were limited to only keeping two of each edition.
I was sad that we had to throw some away simply because there was no space to keep them all. Even though we already had two copies, I felt bad for the remaining extras. It was a little ironic because it was almost like throwing time away (since they were calendars) yet we had used a lot of time considering which ones to keep. In the end, my mentor let me keep some of the ones with many copies, and I was satisfied with the results.
Finally, I ended the week working on more book repairs. I did more hinge repairs, and I am starting to get more comfortable with the method. It was a bit tricky at first because there was a fine line between putting too little glue and it dried too quickly and putting too much glue and the paper ripped from being too wet. Thanks to all the practice, I figured out how much glue to use, and now I am fairly proficient. I also continued to make dust covers, yet there was a particular challenge presented to me this week: I needed to make one for a book without a removable cover. The books I had worked with before all had removable dust jackets that I could simply wrap entirely with the material, but I did not have the liberty of doing the same process for this book. I had to figure out how to put plastic over the cover while also holding it in place without relying on the paper.
My solution was to cut the paper out in the middle section where it would have been obstructed by the pages and leave margins on the edges to fold and create enough tension to hold it in place. To achieve this, I used a small cutter instead of the bulky box cutter so I could get more precise cuts. I still struggled to get my cuts to be perfectly straight, but it worked better than before. I am pretty proud of myself for figuring it all out by myself, even though the method is inefficient and likely not the best way to go about it.
It took a while to think of a way to make that dust cover, and the method is inefficient and likely not the best way to go about it. But, I did come up with it on the spot and by myself, so I would say that my work is not too terrible.
Here is a poem about my interactions with time this week:
The museum volunteer
Horribly inefficient
Throws time away
Metaphorically and physically,
Accidentally and intentionally
Next week, I will be learning something new: cataloging and photography as means of preservation. My mentor showed me an example where she cataloged some T-shirts and put them on a website, and I am excited to see the process behind that work.
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