AU's McKinley Hall

Well folks, summer has officially come to a close for this fledgling public historian.  Now that I am back in the DC area (currently residing in Fairfax, VA), its time to once again hit the books.  My courses this semester include Colloquium in U.S. History I (early 17th century – the American Civil War) with Dr. Alan Kraut and Empire in Comparative Perspectives, a seminar that analyzes theories of European imperialism and where the U.S. fits in, with Dr. Max Paul Friedman.  Both courses fulfill necessary graduation requirements and I look forward to soaking up the wisdom of these two professors. Needless to say, I’m excited to hit the books for one more year in the District!

Meanwhile, I have obtained a paid internship with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History working as a web developer.  My colleague Jordan Grant and I will be creating a website that documents the developmental stages of the institution’s forthcoming American Enterprise exhibit. American Enterprise focuses on the history of business, work, and money in America, from our early agricultural beginnings to the modern sustainability movement. Surely, this position will expand on my digital history skill set and provide further html and php coding experience. Fortunately for myself, I spent the entire summer learning the ins and outs of Omeka (the web-based exhibit building software used to create Mapping the Brew City), which NMAH has decided to employ for this project. If any readers know of a useful online model that tracks the progress of a forthcoming museum exhibit, please let me know. As far as I can tell, this project embodies a novel concept. You can expect to read more about this thrilling endeavor in the near future.

Of course, besides taking classes and interning, I will be filling the stacks at AU’s Bender Library.

Best of luck to all returning students this Fall!

Interested in the Mapping the Brew City project?

Follow us on Twitter:

Readings in Public History Seminar frequently outlined important debates taking place in the field, from the ‘culture wars,’ to interpreting historic events from diverse social perspectives, to appropriate methods of digitizing museum collections.  We shared our thoughts in class, analyzed new disciplinary trends and offered solutions to problems.  My internship at the Milwaukee County Historical Society granted me an opportunity to re-enter these debates and witness first hand recent field developments, “best practices,” and controversies discussed last year.  With that in mind, I acquired a new perspective on museum registration methods, the politics of working at a small historical institution, and exhibition planning; one that I could not have developed without hands-on field experience.

Lacking the benefit of a collections management course at AU (or at least the time to take one), I relied on my internship at MCHS to train me in the latest methods of museum registration.  Popular approaches to cataloging, cleaning, photographing, and exhibiting artifacts change every few years and updating old curatorial habits is essential to a museum’s effectiveness.  As Gail Anderson writes, “Collections – historically viewed as the center of museum activities – have moved toward a supporting role that advances the educational impact of the museum.”[1] This holds true at MCHS, where I prepared a collection of artifacts for both exhibition and independent public research.  In fact, one of my favorite tasks was creating Mylar sleeves that housed Milwaukee brewery advertisements.  This menial “arts and crafts” duty, for lack of a better term, gave me a strange sense of importance, both to the Society and to the public.

Moreover, I learned how central a collections curator’s role is to a museum’s success.  As we discuss often, public historians must know how to multi-task.  As Rebecca A Buck argues, collections curators at small historical institutions are “charged with everything from development to housekeeping and may call on volunteers to perform registration and collections management tasks.”[2] Because my supervisor’s roles varied, I was able to dip my hand in writing, exhibition planning, and museum registration.

A curator’s academic training is just as valuable.  Susan Pearce says it best, “no extended interpretations are possible until a piece has been identified, and identification…is the curator’s job.  Each collection archive embraces a range of material types which have different storage and conservation requirements and perhaps different security demands.”[3] Therefore, learning how to correctly identify, protect, and store valuable artifacts provided a crucial skill-set, un-obtainable in the classroom.

Something else I discovered outside of our discussions is that many small cultural institutions are behind the curve when it comes to connecting Internet users to their collections.  While some artifacts are available for online viewing and interpretation, most MCHS objects are only recorded in a third-party computer program, which remains inaccessible to the public.  Maintaining organized electronic collections is imperative.  However, recent trends in the field point to establishing interactive exhibitions, virtual collections, and discussion boards that the public can participate in.  With an overworked staff lacking the proper training in HTML, PHP, and other coding programs, MCHS cannot look in-house to expand its digital presence.  Therefore, a freelance web design company was hired to create a site and upload content, not the curators.  What is more, improving their site’s electronic collections should save MCHS time, storage space, and money.  As Genoways and Ireland point out, emerging technologies are “raising new questions about what constitutes a collection and whether “objects” can exist solely in electronic form.”[4]

In addition to learning the practical duties of a collections curator, it was interesting to observe how a historical society’s governing structure can influence its day-to-day operations.  Because there currently is no executive director providing leadership from the top, MCHS functions like a chicken with its head cut off.  Ensuring the wishes of the institution’s temporary director, in this case a board member more concerned with locating financial partners than outlining the museum’s interpretive vision, occasionally gets in the way of fulfilling the museum’s responsibility to educate all members of Milwaukee’s public.  As Gail Anderson argues, “Visionary leaders have developed the ability to strike a balance between assessing the impact of external trends and examining their institution’s capability to remain strategically positioned in the marketplace.”[5]

Considering the extent to which Milwaukee’s social geography transformed after World War II, I am not sure MCHS does enough to reach out to inner city African American and Latino neighborhoods.  Catering to the Society’s current membership, who are by-and-large of European descent, over the age of 50, and rarely travel downtown, unintentionally influences the educational content provided by the museum.  For example, exhibiting Milwaukee’s brewing or Socialist past takes precedence over the city’s more complicated history of race relations.  As Anderson goes on to say, “the process of assessing the external environment is an essential precursor to understanding what pressing issues and matters affect our communities and the public and, as a result, our museums.”[6] Ideally, the new executive director will be a museum professional who works hard to ensure that future museum exhibitions reflect Milwaukee’s cultural diversity.  Furthermore, building a suitable organizational infrastructure will be vital to “supporting the board, staff, and volunteers in their efforts to raise financial support, build collections, and implement effective and appropriate public programs.”[7]

Finally, I learned how museums plan for new exhibits by sitting in on the developmental stages of MCHS’s upcoming brewery exhibit.  Because this is the first exhibit opening after the museum’s costly and stressful renovation process, the curatorial team wants to get it right.  After building an outline, my supervisor and I looked for artifacts that matched exhibit themes and the archival curator did the same.  At the next stage, the curators must present their artistic vision to the board, make any necessary changes, estimate financing, secure funding, and send the initial blueprint to a third party design team.  Many questions remain unanswered.  For example, how will the designers utilize a space that features enormous windows that let in too much light?  Will the exhibit reflect the experiences of inner-city groups? Will Miller-Coors be involved and in what capacity?  I look forward to seeing how the MCHS staff answers these questions and more upon my return next summer.  Only this time, I’ll simply be an interested tourist.

[1] Gail Anderson, Reinventing the museum: historical and contemporary perspectives on the paradigm shift (Rowman Altamira, 2004), 4.

[2] Rebecca A. Buck and Jean Allman Gilmore, Collection Conundrums: Solving collections Management Mysteries, 1st ed. (Amer Assn of Museums, 2007), viii.

[3] Susan M Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 119-121.

[4] Hugh H. Genoways and Lynne M. Ireland, Museum administration: an introduction (Rowman Altamira, 2003), 4.

[5] Anderson, Reinventing the museum, 9.

[6] Ibid., 9.

[7] Ibid., 5.

• Pabst, Miller, and Sushi?
• Bottles and Cans...A Just Clap Your Hands
• What do digital history projects have in common with the NBA?
• Brief Article to Appear in MCHS Newsletter
• Like a Kid in a Candy Store
• Mapping the Cream City: Building a Community Brew
• What's the Summer Got in Store?
• Tweeting a New Social History
• New Dimension to Google's Copyright Infringement Battle
• Taking a Break From the Digital History Debate with a Website Review
• Arlington House Project Addendum
• National Park Service and Web 2.0? Where to Start?
• Teaching 2.0
• Archiving History in the Digital Age
• Kindle to the Mac ('s)
• Lincoln Reconsidered
• Interpreting the Past in Philly