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Blog post - Back To The Basement Internship Entry 10
With all the promotion and social media heavy work I have done in the last few weeks, I haven’t had a chance to spend that much time tending to my collections management duties. This week, I made my triumphant return to the basement! There’s always plenty of work to do down there and I feel right at home doing with the artifacts and archives. There were three main things that I was working this week: updating the records from the recent appraisal and returning the items to storage, cataloguing the books inside the bookcase in the Doctor’s Office, and arranging proper storage of items in our collection with the help of Carr McLean.
When managing the collection at Banting House, I can sometimes be a little hard to find. I could be tucked away in one of the storage rooms ensuring items are put away properly, or elusively running up and down the stairs to get artifacts the need catalogued, or I could be buried somewhere in the basement wrapping books in tissue paper. I can be hard to catch when I’m in the zone down there, but a lot of times you will find me in the room with the desktop, plugging away on PastPerfect to make sure our records are as accurate and useful to us as possible. I spent a lot of time at that computer this week both creating and updating records. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been working on cataloguing everything on display in the Doctor’s Office, and I have continued that work this week. All that is left is the books in the bookcase and that is exactly what I’ve been working away at! I’ve also had to update the records for items in the appraisal I wrote about in a previous post. All of the values go into the system and then, since none of the items have been inventoried, I updated the exact locations I stored them in. There’s always more work to do when managing a collection so its a safe bet that you’ll find me in the basement again throughout the rest of my internship!
I also put together an order for Carr McLean to get Banting House some archival storage supplies. We have a big collection that is currently sprawled out on a table in the basement waiting to be properly stored which it will be very soon! We received our order yesterday and using the new supplies to organize this collection is a priority for me today! I am excited for the coming week, and I am even excited to work my first weekend shift tomorrow! It will be interesting to see the difference between Banting House on a weekday and Banting House on a Saturday! I guess I’ll find out!