Student Involvment in the Collection Department at the LSU Rural Life Museum
Museums are valuable tools for education and decimation of cultural knowledge and the LSU Rural Life Museum is no exception. One of the values of being an educational environment is the opportunity educate students and to provide a venue for training future stewards of cultural preservation. Over the past school year, I have had the privilege of working with several of these historians and enthusiasts of cultural history. Their contribution has been immensely valuable to the development of the Rural Life Museum collections department.
Throughout the summer 2020, fall 2020, and spring 2021 semesters the museum has hosted seven students from LSU and Southeastern in the collections department. The students have been a combination of interns, Work Study, and President’s Aid. These students come from a variety of backgrounds and incorporate their experience and knowledge into museum tasks. Hands on experience is a vital component to any filed and the museum provides a laboratory setting for students to work with artifacts in the collection. The main student projects over the past year have been, inventorying the museum collection, scanning, and organizing old museum records, maintaining, and cleaning the collection, and working on the spring textile exhibit. Students at the Rural Life Museum gain experience in the procedures of a museum collection department while learning proper handling, numbering, tracking, and care of museum collections.
The collections student workers are made up of two history interns: Madison Dugger, an LSU graduate applying to master’s programs, and Taylor Aiken, a Southeastern undergraduate. Both Madison and Taylor have been assisting in the inventory of the collection. They have been photographing, describing, and logging conditions and accession numbers on artifacts in the exhibit barn and historic buildings.
Evelyn Davis is an LSU graduate student in the Master of Library and Information Science program at LSU. Evelyn assisted in inventorying books, documents, photographs, and other archival material in the LSU Rural Life collection. She not only updated conditions and locations of objects in the museum cataloging software, but she assisted in the implementation of preventative preservation of paper and books in the collection by properly packing and storing material.
Sadie Forbes and Conrad Hebert are Work Study and President’s Aid students in the undergraduate Computer Science program at LSU. Sadie has been scanning and organizing the paper museum records and uploading them into the correct computer files, while Conrad has been working with Madison and Taylor to inventory the collection.
Kat Cotton, an LSU undergraduate in Textiles, Apparel Design, and Merchandising, and Katherine Bankhead, an LSU undergraduate in Anthropology, were both integral to the design, research, organization, and installation of the Rural Life Museum’s spring and summer textile exhibit, Threads of Ingenuity: Textiles, Techniques and Traditions of the Past.
It is exciting to get to be a part of these student’s educational journey, however the benefit of students help in collections goes beyond simply hands on experience for the students. Their involvement has been a necessity in moving forward with many collections’ projects. Students have been working diligently on important and time-consuming tasks such as inventory, artifact cleaning, and digitization of museum records. Not only has student help been essential in advancing collections projects but they bring new enthusiasm, ideas, and experience to the department and collections projects.
Article by: Katherine Fresina
