Maitland A&H Blog Entry 3

     While interning at Maitland A&H, I have questioned my importance while working there. I have concluded that my time working has been one of the best experiences I have done. I have learned the importance of my job by discussing with other students working on different projects. From talking to them, I have learned that my time and dedication while working have allowed other students to use my work for their own gain and accomplish their projects. From their response, I feel rejoiced knowing that people use what I posted for their research.

    In my first post, I discussed how people who are the ones who put documents and pictures on the internet had benefited the historical field greatly. Learning so quickly that people use my work has allowed me to be more open to the scanning process. As mentioned last time, the task is tedious, but personally, being thanked by those who need it has allowed me to appreciate an online source even more. The time it takes to document the object, scan it for digital use, and then have it available to the public could take hours to complete. Such a concept of the speed and the amount of time it takes to get a group of documents done should be emphasized in grad school. Professors should teach one that requesting a museum to have copies available online will take a significant amount of time and could take weeks, depending on how fast the process can go. It should be noted that Maitland A&H has personally thanked me for my efforts in starting the process as they do not have the manpower to do it. Other museums may not be so lucky to have an intern or employee available.

    Now time is what I would consider the most unabundant resource that most museums may not; the other is technical resources. The first week that I had attended, the exhibitions manager told me that the museum did not have a scanner, and it was still coming. Once the scanner did arrive, my group was unable to scan pictures, as an adobe program had to be installed, which meant that all photos had to wait another week. Once the scanner was available and the program was running, we were forced to work on an outdated laptop that would slow down after a couple of hours of work and need to be shut down, so it takes a break and is well enough to work correctly again. The computer's memory was also being filled up quickly from all the scans. These problems are expensive ones that the museum had to hurdle over. To have these documents available online should be again emphasized how much work it takes to get documents online and further understand how much a gift it is to be able to read and see documents on the web.



The first photo is to demonstrate what my workstation is while working. The picture shows the computer scanner, a stack of photos I was scanning, and finally, and the document box I have been working on since arriving.

The second photo shows how many document boxes one shelf can hold.

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