Curiosity Thrilled The Cat

The NMHFM is housed in an old school building as I may have mentioned before. You can find me upstairs, down the dimly lit, empty locker-lined hallway of the old school building that now serves as the museum's collection space (actually slightly creepy). One of the ex-classrooms now serves as my collections haven: one of the several object and artifact storage areas. I've always loved walking into the behind-the-scenes, "Authorized Personnel Only" spaces. As a kid in a museum or historical site, I was always tempted to try to open the doors that read "Employees Only" and other similar messages (and usually they were really old doors, which made the temptation all the more difficult). But now I'm officially allowed to open those doors and explore.

Today I was thrilled to dive into my first curatorial project of the summer: accessioning, cataloging, and labeling a couple of collections of old miners' lamps. Okay, this might sound boring to some of you, but these lamps are ridiculously cool. Some of them still have solidified wax and oil remnants inside; a couple still have wicks! One in particular has the previous owner's initials engraved on it with what looks like a crossed hammer and pick-axe emblem underneath. These lamps would've shed light on the miner's work, making it possible for him (and in more recent history, her) to see what they were doing while they were down in the mine, and were therefore pretty essential to getting the job done.

Check out the photos below. I can't wait to keep working with these neat little pieces of history!

This kind of project is time-consuming, but not in an negative way; going through each object, filling out condition reports, and writing the object ID number on each of the lamps is methodologically satisfying! After all the forms and photos are taken, the information has to be added to Past Perfect (cataloging program). There are several shelves of these lamps, and I'm not even done with the first one!

Left to right, steps 1, 2, & 3 for labeling an artifact. It's sort of like applying nail polish and then writing on it (BUT IT'S NOT NAIL POLISH, DON'T DO THAT). This stuff takes a while to dry, which is one of the reasons why it's time-consuming.

3 hours' worth of work: 10 lamps, labeled with object ID number and completed condition reports