Open gallery
Hello, dear readers! I am Kate Medlock, a senior art history major. During my last semester here, I applied for an academic internship at Distinctive Collections & Archives under the direction of Megan Firestone, the Head of Distinctive Collections & Archives. I believed this internship would be an excellent opportunity to explore my passion for working with artifacts.
After a month into this internship, I would say that wish has been fulfilled! I am currently working on the first of three projects regarding different cases of under-documented and needing rehousing in our expansive collections – four Navajo rugs donated to us in 1979 that had been minimally housed and had very little written about in any of our systems.
My job is to research the broader history of Navajo rugs, create a list of items needed to properly clean and store these textiles, and inspect them closely to document their physical description/condition. This process will culminate in a complete finding aid, high-quality photos, and more information on these beautiful textiles available to the student body and the general public.
I hope to add more to this blog post to discuss my two future projects this semester, which include finishing rehousing our facsimile collection and writing subsequent finding aids, and working with Zalle’s pottery collection of Panamanian pottery, to research, properly house, and write a finding aid. I look forward to working with these objects and learning more about what it means to work in an archival setting. Stay tuned for more!