Farewell from Lydia

After a wonderful 7 weeks, my time as an intern at ANSM has end! I am so fortunate and thankful that, through Saint Mary’s University, I have been able to work with ANSM this summer. I have enjoyed having the opportunity to learn and grow surrounded by the most wonderful staff members I have had the pleasure of working with. Working at ANSM provided me with the unique experience of seeing the “behind the scenes” that helps keep our Nova Scotia museums moving forward. I have been so inspired by the hard work and dedication that everybody brings to the heritage sector, and I can only hope that I can bring a similar passion to the field one day.

I am also very fortunate that I was given the opportunity to work on so many different projects throughout the summer. I especially enjoyed working on our A/V Hub training project, as I was given the task of diving into research about A/V material and equipment care and conservation, assisting in developing a presentation for the training sessions. Additionally, I put together a database of potential digitization resources that can be utilized in future digitization projects. It has been a pleasure to see how the work I have done is being implemented in the real-world, and that it is used to help museums improve and learn about their collections.

I also worked extensively on cleaning up the CollectiveAccess database. I scanned through thousands of records, and made manual changes to somewhere around 2,000, ensuring information could be found about the condition of the object in the newly established “Condition & Treatment” field. While exhaustive and tedious, this helped me to achieve a greater understanding of the database, as well as get a look into some of the objects in holding at Nova Scotia Museums. I also worked on adding information to the Made in Nova Scotia database by reading material, and supplementing new information for existing entries, or creating entirely new ones.

I am infinitely grateful to ANSM for all I have learned, and for the support they have given me. As I continue my education at the University of Edinburgh this fall, I am confident that a strong foundation for museum work has been laid because of my work at ANSM.

~Lydia