Assessing the Space

In the past week, the HA class has made a fair amount of progress on our exhibit. We've all been split into one (or in some cases two) of five committees to work on the project: curators, educators, photographers/social media coordinators, designers, and registrars. Although certain committees are going to have more to do than others at each stage of exhibit creation, everybody has something to work on right now and we're all eager to plan things. We've also continued to build a list of objects that we could potentially relate to our theme, the Question of History. However, the biggest thing we did related to the exhibit this week taking a trip to EIU's Booth Library on Wednesday to look at and learn about what our exhibit space would look like and what we would have available to us. We were shown the various display cases at Booth, found out what level of environmental control we would be able to have and were given examples of what past HA classes have done with the space in order to help us generate ideas.

One of the exhibit cases at Booth Library

In general, we learned a lot during this visit and we left with many questions answered and a clearer idea of what we have to work with. This will help both with our planning and our collaboration with the institutions that will hopefully be lending us a portion of their collections to create the exhibit. However, we also came away with a lot to think about. I think one major conclusion we came to as a group after our trip to the library is that we have a lot more space than we thought. However, seeing the space and learning about the resources at our disposal has already produced many new ideas, so I'm sure we can come up with a plan to use what we're given. With this space in mind, the exhibit that will fill it is beginning to take shape, and I look forward to working on it.