During my internship, I worked on a wide variety of projects. I created three new NovaMuseEd activities about domestic textiles – quilts, hooked rugs, and samplers, to be specific – and an extra activity about the Canadian Census. I was even able to translate one of my textile activities into French to connect to the Conseil scolaire acadien provincial curriculum! I also frequently worked with CollectiveAccess in a number of ways. First, I reviewed the CollectiveAccess manual and tutorial videos to identify where the materials should be updated. After becoming familiar with the system and its training materials, I created two new training modules for sites to use when training new staff or looking for a refresher. I also spent a lot of time cleaning data. By the end of my internship, I worked through 20 sites’ databases to review over 12,000 entities!
Besides this, I have been working with Karin to develop a new condition reporting feature on CollectiveAccess. Based on what our survey respondents said, hopefully the new condition reporting tab will be helpful! Throughout the last month of my internship, I have been working with SMEs to enrich domestic textile records on NovaMuse. In the end, with the help of my two SMEs, Scott Robson and Anita Price, I was able to enrich around 90 object records!
red = SME work
blue = entity clean-up
I learned so many things that will be helpful during my future career in museums – from how to answer tricky questions during site visits, to being able to write Facebook posts highlighting your collections. I worked on projects that made what I learned in class make so much sense, and I also learned things I never could have in a classroom. I look forward to using everything I learned and accomplished during my time with ANSM as I continue learning about and working in museums. I am so grateful to the ANSM team and to everyone who has supported my learning during my time “in” Nova Scotia. Now I know how many great museums there are to visit once I finally make it out to Nova Scotia!
