Apprentice: Noah

The Rice County Historical Society has recently begun a new high school volunteer program, the Museum Apprentice Program. The next round of orientation will begin on September 25. Apprentices in grades 8-12 will meet every Tuesday from 3:30-5:30 and learn what is involved with work at a museum, and will do independent projects involving research, collections, exhibits and more!

Below is a testimonial from a current MAPster:

My name is Noah and I have been volunteering at the Rice County Historical Society for the last three months as a member of the MAP program.  During the MAP program I have been kept busy doing many different kinds of interesting tasks around the museum.  Recently, I have been repairing old, worn books in the Rare Book Room.  My time hasn’t just been about repairing books though.  I have helped catalog photos, move files, and research bikes as well.  Another job I have had was helping with the log cabin during the fair.

I currently live in Faribault, with no intention of moving away.  I am homeschooled, and in the eighth grade.  Being the eldest child, I have three younger siblings; two sisters and one brother.  Some of the things I enjoy are playing games and reading.  Spending time with my family is also something that I enjoy.  I have fun doing things in my homeschool group.  Currently I have been going over to a friend’s house every two weeks to play games with him and a few other friends.  I have recently caught wind that our film group may be starting up again soon.  The group stopped making films for a while because both the director and producer/main cameraman got behind on their schoolwork and had to catch up.  Our group (Phantom Films) has turned out a number of short movies, and it’s a blast doing them, so I can’t wait to start doing it again.

It has been enjoyable experience volunteering here at Rice County Historical Society.  I’ve gotten to work on interesting projects, sit around all day at the fair, and spend time with different people.  Who knows what I will be doing here next!

Indian Artifact Exhibit Re-Design

Hello, I am Bridgette Reuvers-Slinger, a student from Hamline University, majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Sociology. I have been interning at the Rice County Historical Society for about two and a half weeks now. Sue Garwood has asked me to help out with a display that they have that she feels is not up to speed. This has become my daily project.

The collection at hand is a set of archaic stone tools that were donated in the 1930s that were not cataloged and very little was known about the tools. I am in the process of cleaning old museum wax off of the tools, putting new accession numbers on each tool, measuring and documenting them, and writing descriptions about each individual tool. The descriptions that I have been writing include things such as potential names and how they were made. I have also spent a lot of time reading and researching not only the time periods but also the material of the tools.

One of the neat things that I have encountered thus far is one of the tools that I had initially thought was used for animal hide scraping. I had thought this because of the shape of the tool and the way that it compared to the other tools. After some more investigating and research I realized that the tool was not only categorized in the wrong time period but that it was not a scraping tool at all. After my research, I determined it to be a knife from an earlier time period. Thus far I have found three more tools that were incorrectly categorized as far as time periods. I have been using the physical evidence of the tools to try and decipher the time period. There are many books that are available that have visual representations of the tools that I have used for comparisons. 

My end goal is to have the exhibit completely re-designed by the end of the month. One of the modifications includes a new way to display the tools in the collection. Perhaps instead of setting it up chronologically it would be more visually appealing to display the tools by the function. With some volunteer and staff assistance, I have already taken the background fabric off of the display and replaced it with new clean fabric. Soon I will start to write draft exhibit labels that will accompany the display.  

Collection Care Grant - Phase One: Women's Clothing and Quilts

We've been most fortunate to receive three Minnesota Legacy grants this year.  A Minnesota Bookshelf Grant, funds to help pay for a Historic Structures Grant of the Thorstien Veblen Farmstead, and a Collections Care grant.  I"ll share more information about the first two list at a later time.  For now, however, I thought you might be interested in seeing some of the Collections Care grant work.

This grant, titled Collection Care: Phase 1, is focused on inventorying, photographing, repacking, and storing our quilt and women's clothing collection.  We will then integrate the photographs and location information into our PastPerfect database. This is phase one of a larger collections care project to transfer all collections management data to PastPerfect, photograph and inventory the entire collection, and improve over all collections care at the Rice County Historical Society. The dollars are helping to pay for the boxes, padded hangers, tissue, and a new clothes rack but most importantly, they are helping pay for a Summer Intern, Alicia Reuter, to work on the project. 

Here are some images of the work:

Here you can see the work room where Alicia is bringing the objects from the collections storage space, photographing them, and then rehousing them.















Every artifacts is photographed individually...


...and together (if its an ensemble)...


...then it is carefully packed away...


...labeled with the entire contents and a black and white photo for each item in the box....


...and then the boxes are stored in the attic.