This week at Eckley Miners’ Village, I spent some more time cleaning spaces for public view, while also completing another task regarding our internal collections database, and then finally returning to the major inventorying project from a few weeks ago.
Monday was spent cleaning the site’s Catholic church. I spent the entire day there, beginning with wiping down each and every pew with a cotton rag. They were incredibly dusty all throughout and needed thorough cleaning. Since there are a few dozen in the building, it took most of the morning until lunch to properly clean every pew. Afterwards, I also wiped down the windowsills, railings, and any other flat surface around the building’s interior that had accumulated dust.
That afternoon, I had to sweep the church’s floors. This was an even more tedious task—due to the closeness of the pews to one another, and the sheer size of the church, there was an incredibly large surface area of floor that had to be swept in a certain way to ensure all of the dirt, dust, and dead bugs, etc. were properly swept up and not just pushed around under each seat. Ultimately, it took a good few hours to finish sweeping, and there was quite a lot of debris piled up at the end to be picked up!
While assuredly tedious and uneventful, cleaning mundane areas such as this is essential in consideration not only of the delicate nature of the building itself, but also its popularity as a site for public view. And, in the case of this church, the process of sufficient cleaning is often time-consuming, but it was undeniably rewarding at the end of the day when the church looked significantly tidier.
On Tuesday, I was asked to go through artifacts catalogued in ARGUS (our internal collections software) that had been denied for online publication and give certain objects generic online descriptions. Several weeks ago, I had been asked to do the same for items at Eckley, but this time I did so for the collection at the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton, PA. This project took the better half of the day and was significantly quicker than the process for Eckley, considering there were far less relevant artifacts to assess for the Scranton site.
It was interesting to familiarize myself with a portion (albeit small) of the collection at the AHM, since I have never been there nor really investigated many of the artifacts held there.
For Wednesday, I began what will likely be a several-week project for my time at Eckley—I continued the inventorying of an artifact storage house on-site. This was, as before, a slow and careful process of comparing records of artifacts in our database regarding their condition, description, location, etc. (as of 2004, usually) to the actual details of said objects. However, this time was much slower considering a few factors. Firstly, I will be performing the rest of the inventorying on my own, whereas last time there were one to two other people working as well. Secondly, because of the lack of a device with access to the spreadsheets containing the relevant records, I had to print out the sheets as well as a paper form I made to write notes and compare records. This added several more steps to the process of finding an artifact, searching for its number and supposed location, and, in the event of details being incorrect or insufficient, writing down proper information and ensuring it will be plugged into the spreadsheet at a later date, because everything had to be done on paper and by hand as opposed to typed directly into the sheet, and it is far more difficult to search for records by number or description without computer shortcuts.
It was understandably frustrating having to take even more time than needed to perform an already lengthy and tedious job. However, I made do, and I did make some progress. Tentatively, I will have access to a state-issued electronic device for the remainder of this inventory, so it should go smoother here on out.
