Talley Your Adventure – The Blog

Hello bloggers! I hope I didn’t leave you for too long this time! School is over for me this semester. Another round of A’s under my belt, some excellent experience logged from the Clinton Library and by the end of the month I will be married. I’m excited to share with you a few things that have been happening to me recently, and of course to dive into summer plans!

Now that the end of the semester is really here, and I have successfully defended my thesis, all that is left in that department is editing and the final copy for the graduate school. In the fall, I will finish up my master’s degree with my last semester! I will have three wonderful classes that will help me define my Public History degree in the museum field, and I will continue back with the Clinton Library. 

This summer, I will be full time at Central High National Historic Site. I hope that if you are in the Little Rock area, you will swing by and join us on a tour or come visit the museum itself and learn about the tense situation that happened right here at Central High School in 1957. In addition to this, we are kicking off our #findyourpark initiative. The National Park Service will celebrate their centennial next year (100 years of service!!) and the National Park Foundation is recruiting people from all over the country to be apart of the celebration! The National Park Service includes not only parks, but historic sites, monuments, battlefields, etc. and if you find a place to call your own, or possibly several, tell us about it! Blog about it, write about it, sing, dance, write a poem about it…and share it with others. Collaborate. Engage. This is not just my country, but yours as well. And stop by Central High National Historic Site, we can take a selfie together. 🙂 Get excited with this video and see how you can be involved!!

Until next time bloggers. Have a safe summer, and I hope to see those national park pictures floating around!

Welcome back, bloggers! As promised, I am here to excitedly announce the opening of the Dinosaur Around the World, a Passport to Pangea at the Clinton Library this weekend. If you are in Little Rock, I highly suggest you come downtown and check us out!

The crazy thing about helping to set up this exhibit is that most of the work is done by the Imagine crew, who help with the animations of the dinosaurs (yes, they move!) There are two exhibits, one on the main floor and another separate one on the second floor of the museum. In addition to educating the public about dinosaurs, it also ties back to Bill Clinton himself since he was the one to designated the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument as a national monument in 1996.  I am very excited to come to the opening and view the dinosaurs in their ‘natural habitat’ and hope to see lots of people there as well. Dinosaurs have always fascinated me, and I have actually visited both the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument as well. Both are beautiful, and deserve to be featured throughout the nation!

Since most of the work is being done by the professions working for Imagine, that left a lot of the little details to us here in the museum. Mostly I have been helping with the displays – cleaning the Plexiglas, helping to arrange things, making backings for the information cards to rest on, and general help around the exhibit. This is all in addition to inventory, updating TMS and taking photos of Foreign Head of State gifts.

In addition to all this dinosaur exhibit, I am proud to announce that I have successfully passed my thesis defense on Carl Edward Bailey as of April 8th, 2015! Yay!! I had such a great audience as well, including someone from the Political Science department and my mom, who Skyped in from North Carolina to be there for the festivities! Clinton (my fiance) was also in attendance, as well as three graduate students. Thanks everyone for taking time out of your day! I got a lovely shout-out from both Central National Historic Site and the Center for Arkansas History and Culture about my successful defense, and that makes it even more special! Check out the digital exhibit that I used to accompany my process paper and when it is made available through the school, I can show you the paper as well! 🙂

Until next time, bloggers!

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!!