My first trip back to the museum for work happened in mid-September, and I’ve been back once a month since then. Core essential staff have been required to be onsite since the closure - teams including security, facilities, and housekeeping. Over the summer, limited additional teams whose work required them to be on campus were allowed to return in a controlled manner. This coincided with institution-wide layoffs and restructuring. I kept my job, but was moved to a new department. Regardless, both my old and new departments were permitted to return onsite. And so, to date, I’ve made three trips back to the museum.
The first trip back marked six months since the majority of the museum started working remotely. I had quite a few reference requests that required access to our card catalog and physical archives, so this took up a substantial portion of my time. I also ensured that the collection was generally intact, and that there were no glaring environmental or other condition issues that needed attention. I wrapped up the trip by gathering some information about the collection itself for my old department’s standard operating procedures manual - documentation that’s proven to be helpful in the transition to my new department.
The second and third trips back felt slightly less frenzied in pace. Given the shorter time between these visits, far fewer reference requests had built up. This meant that I had time to turn to another project: digitizing our exhibition documentation catalog cards. Totalling roughly three drawers, these cards hold information for which exhibitions at the museum were documented between the early 1900s and 1970s. After this time, this information was captured digitally in a series of databases for the department. I managed to get through the digitization of all 3,000+ cards.
Since queries for exhibitions are common, my hope is that the digitized cards will be a useful reference for me and other staff. But to make access even easier, I plan on transcribing the exhibition titles and unique identifiers for the corresponding negatives or transparencies. And to facilitate future plans for the comprehensive digitization of all these photographic materials, and to link the images with the exhibition records in our collections management system, I aim to link the archive’s unique identifiers with the exhibition record IDs. In turn, this should result in many more archival images on the exhibition portal of the public website.
I’ve struggled with the idea that non-essential organizations like our museum should open, given the very real risk of COVID in our city, state, and country. The museum has recently been forced by our governor to close the museum to the public given the surge in cases leading up the holidays, though this closure does not apply to staff. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been able to set my own schedule for returning to work, and I wish that this was the case for everyone. I hope that the exhibition documentation catalog card project can provide additional work for museum staff working remotely, especially if we return to a broader closure of the campus. It’s hard to anticipate what the future will bring these days, but I’m grateful to still be employed, to have found ways of doing my work, and for all the support and camaraderie of my colleagues.