6 June 2025
As much as every week in my internship is unique, there are a lot of constants and a lot of work that is always ongoing. Every week I am tasked with posting on social media or making templates to further establish Banting House’s consistent brand. Every week I spend plenty of time in the basement doing collection management. It is also fairly easy to bounce around from task to task if I want to change up my day. If I feel I’ve spent too long doing social media work and need a break, I make my way down to the basement to catalogue or inventory. And I am always glad to run a tour when someone comes in to add more variety to my day! This week has seen me do a lot of the same different activities that I always do, but I did get a lot of work done this week on an ongoing project!
Through my quest to inventory everything in Banting House’s collection, I discovered that a majority of what was on display in the Doctor’s Office had never been officially logged in our digital system. Most of what is on exhibit in that room has been there since before the museum officially opened. We have some paper records that tell us who donated the objects and an old binder that gave a brief description of everything on display, but no searchable record with a photo attached like I can find on PastPerfect. Every museum has a backlog of artifacts or archives in their collection that just haven’t been officially put into the system, and I was happy to take on the task of ensuring that everything on display in that gallery is photographed and makes its way into our official catalogue on PastPerfect. Luckily I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel as the binder that a previous intern had put together had very good descriptions, measurements, and condition notes on each object. It took some time to match the artifacts with their donor information and organize myself enough to start copying the records into the computer, and then I had to sneak upstairs when there were no visitors in the museum to take photos of the objects I was cataloguing. I am not quite finished with the project yet, but I got a lot of it done this week! Rest assured, most of the objects you see on display in the Doctor’s Office are officially in our digital catalogue!
I have been slowly working on this project for weeks and I am glad to know that I am close to completing it! It’s incredible just how much can be accomplished in a week. Not only have I made a lot of progress on accessioning the Doctor’s Office this week, I did a lot of other work for social media campaigns that I prepped on Canva, I made significant progress in preparing programming that Banting House will be able to launch soon, and I gave some great tours this week to visitors who really engaged with everything this museum is about! I expect next week to have more of the same with unique experiences sprinkled in, and I am excited to do it all!