By Lydia Fair, 2019 Desilets Memorial Intern
Last week my focus was organizing and paring down files in the Old Academy building with Assistant Director Laura Stagliola. Through this project I become oriented with some of the past programs and fundraisers put on by the Framingham History Center. As a visual media student, I was very interested to see how the museum’s graphics evolved throughout decades. On Tuesday the 11th, I attended a Program Committee Meeting and learned about the potential upcoming programs that will coincide with the upcoming “Top Ten” exhibition to bring the Framingham History Center’s most essential artifacts to life. At the end of the week I created an inventory of all of the exhibit cases and continued research for a mini exhibit which I will create at the end of my internship. I also began to learn how to use Past Perfect, which is the software the museum uses to manage the collection.
This week I helped clear away exhibit cases no longer in use from the Civil War exhibit with Curator Stacen Goldman. We took down the partition that separated the World War I exhibit from the Civil War exhibit which really opened up the space. We constructed flat cases that will be used for an upcoming exhibit. I did more organizing in the way of the basement storage and took inventory of the books, glasses and other merchandise that the FHC sells in the gift shop. I started cleaning out folders of old newspaper clippings and articles in the Old Academy, keeping the ones that center on important Framingham milestones, such as the transition from town to city. I was shown by Stacen how Past Perfect is used to keep track of where an article is stored when it is taken off exhibit. All in all, there are 131 years of Framingham Historical and Natural History Society/Framingham History Center history to go through and it’s been a learning experience so far.
