Week 5 Strides

Week 5 has gotten the HAs in the full swing of things! We're beginning to chip away at the big picture of the exhibit. The working title is still "A Question of History," and at the weekly Wednesday meeting, we started to formulate one sentence that summarizes our exhibit. We concluded:

(Of course, like everything else up to this point, this is still an on-going work in progress. We'll finalize it soon!)

The committees have dived right into beginning their respected tasks. This week, the curatorial committee went into Booth Library to measure light and humidity levels in the library and individual cases in order to relay that information to the institutions we all will be working with. They learned how to use special equipment to measure and obtain that information.

The registrar committee has contacted several institutions regarding loan paperwork, and will be compiling them sometime soon. The social media committee has continued to brainstorm ideas for marketing and using Twitter, and the design team looked at Booth Library on Sketchup. The education committee is thinking of interactive programs, but also has been working on the front-end analysis.

In the Exhibits course (HIS 5110), Mr. Riccio asked each of us to complete a front-end analysis. A front-end analysis requires each HA student to survey three individuals around Charleston (including EIU's campus) about the upcoming exhibit. You can see more about this on last week's blog post. Questions range from an individual's perspective on public history sites to knowing different vocabulary terms that correlate to public history and our exhibit. This information will be used to determine the audience for the upcoming exhibit. The Education committee finalized the surveys recently, and we'll be going around the community very soon!

We've also been talking about pop-up museums and how to possibly incorporate that into our exhibit. This was an idea proposed to the class by Claire, who's had experience working with pop-up museums. We'll continue to think about this idea, so stay tuned!

Unrelated to either the committees, pop-up museum, or front-end analysis, we took a trip to the Tarble Arts Center last Thursday to learn about deaccessioning and packing objects. While the packing was not completely done by textbook definitions, the activity was a catalyst to further get us critically thinking about space, storage, shipping, and environmental concerns for the objects for the upcoming exhibit. Questions came up: where will the objects be stored before being displayed in the exhibit? What other, if any, types of environmental concerns should be considered? More than likely, none of us will be around to help take down the exhibit; yet, the deaccessioning project made us envision what the process may be like. A huge thanks to Hailey for supervising us!