Antonio Ferraro
Every day of this week at Eckley, I continued my big inventory project at our artifact storage house. Just as I had started last week, I went through each and every artifact in the house (of which there are thousands!) verifying that everything was where it should be and described properly in our system, ARGUS. Thankfully, I was able to be issued a laptop, so I could now access our spreadsheets more efficiently.
The process is fairly repetitive, going shelf by shelf through the house at an efficient yet careful pace. Over the span of this past week, I probably made it through approximately forty or so shelves, each of which house anywhere from zero or one to upwards of a few dozen artifacts, depending on their size and nature.
While about half of the artifacts that I have inventoried so far are quite mundane, there are many interesting objects sprinkled around that are striking:
A pair of carved wooden prosthetic hands.
A prosthetic arm with a hook for a hand.
A pair of safety goggles.
A book with a relevant title, in many regards.
A nickel-plated trumpet.
A nickel-plated Euphonium.
Engravings on the Euphonium.
A miner’s carbide head lamp, which uses calcium carbide to produce light.
The inventorying process has been hard and tiring work, but it pays off in experience with handling artifacts and the necessary process of inventory itself. This project is anticipated to take me several weeks—essentially, for most of the remainder of my internship at Eckley.
On the mornings of Tuesday and Thursday, I was fortunate enough to be able to sit in on the first two of several “Keystone Learning Sessions,” which are specially curated remote learning sessions for Keystone Interns hosted by significant people in the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission (PHMC). Tuesday’s session was hosted by the PHMC’s chair as a general bureaucratic introduction, while the one on Thursday was hosted by a site director and a regional director who discussed the key processes of museum administration. These have been an excellent opportunity thus far to network with people in crucial positions with notable experience, as well as learn from their history and routines. There are several more planned throughout the summer that I will be attending.
An adorable ceramic turtle that I inventoried.
