By Rebecca Helgeson, Collections Manager
Like most workplaces in Massachusetts, we at the Framingham History Center are working remotely for the foreseeable future. The pandemic has turned life upside down, and we’re doing our best to carry on, to bring FHC into your home through social media, and to continue performing the work that we have promised to do for the Framingham community. My workspace is no longer the various rooms and buildings housing the objects I have been tasked to preserve. It’s now my living room and other spaces around my home where I can find a place to set up my laptop and get to work.
My new office mates
Which begs the question: how can I care for collections without the collections? What can I accomplish that will benefit FHC’s collection? Exactly what am I doing all day?
Believe it or not, there is quite a lot of collections management work that can be done without access to the physical objects. Yes, a large part of my job involves labeling and rehousing objects and updating their locations in our database, but I need the objects to do all of those things.
What I am able to do now are those tasks that tend to get pushed to the back burner because other things are a priority. It’s difficult to take time to deal with backlogs of data entry when the collection is sitting in front of you begging to be updated or a program that starts in the next few weeks needs know what artifacts we have that would be useful teaching tools. It’s not unlike home maintenance. We all have a list of repairs or chores or DIY improvements that we would love to do, if only we had the time.
Well, now, all I have is time. Currently, I am trying to fill in holes in our database records by cross checking them with our handwritten registers. Traditionally, we used to enter accessions into a handwritten register to keep track of objects. When we switched to a digital platform, those entries were all keyed into the system, but, due to the human error that is inevitable when undertaking such a large task, some records were missed or information was not included. This information is crucial for me to be able to track objects and for our curator to accurately present objects from our collection to the public. I have been working backwards through our records, starting with the current year.
It’s been over a month since FHC switched to working remotely, and I have gotten as far through the records as 2007. Do I think I’ll get through all of our records during this time? I hope not. Our records go back to our founding in 1888, and I hope to be working in the history center sooner than it would take to get that far. But, with the Governor’s new extension of school and child care closures, I think I can reach the 1970s before this is all done, and that would be a welcome improvement for our collections.