Humm's HIS5067 Blog

             It has been a journey during my time at Maitland A&H. My overall experience has been fantastic. Starting, I thought sitting at a desk filling out a paper and scanning would be something I would not be interested in doing, but it turned out to be the opposite. Working on this project has allowed me to learn valuable skills that I will be continuing soon. These skills will be used in the summer as I will continue this project as an intern, and I will be working at an Osceola County welcome and history center as an archivist. If I could not work on the project, I would have never learned the difficulties and rewards of working on such a task. Due to this being my final time at Maitland for this semester, I am making my last message to discuss the pro and cons of working as an archivist. The worst part of working is that new archivists may see the work as long and tedious work early on. To think that all the person is doing is filling out a form and scanning an object wi

     When working at any job, there tends to be a part of the job where experience is the only way to learn. While working at the archive, Murphy's law has kicked and made the task more difficult than it should have been. When working, I realized that weather and archives tend not to work together. Trying to preserve items and controlling the temperature and humidity is essential. Changing one element could ruin objects quickly. While there, I had to work in a thunderstorm and worry about getting the things wet and transporting them from one building to another. I also had to work with power outages caused by the storm, which caused technical failures.      While the weather is a mundane part of life, weather means everything to preserve objects for archival work. Sun damage is one of the most common problems that can damage a thing. Most archival rooms are windowless. Having any sun hit the object could fade the color or dry it out and make it brittle or stiff. The sun is the most