Apr 17th 2008 08:36 pm First Day of MAC
Today was my first day of the Midwest Archival Conference Annual Meeting. I started the day by going on a walking tour of the city of Louisville (photos coming as soon!). From there, I visited the Frasier Museum and viewed a engaging exhibit on an excavated slave ship. A school group happened to be there at the same time. I overheard one kid tell a friend that “this is really cool. I thought this would be boring, but it’s really kind of interesting.” Hearing kids say things like that is so inspiring. Maybe that’s cheesy of me, but I love museums that make history fun for the public.
At 1:30, I went to my first session on collection policies and met up with my friend Linnea. My job doesn’t relate to collection policies, so it wasn’t too helpful for my current job, but it was still interesting and a good review of what I learned in grad school.
The keynote speech concerned the need to put materials online to provide greater access. Since this directly relates to my job, this was quite an interesting talk. Jennifer Schaffner gave several examples of institutions’ digital collections, which I will be perusing. She also offered the idea of digitizing snippets of collections to “lure” people into the archives to view the full collection. For a repository with a small budget, this is a viable solution to creating a digital collection. Additionally, this allows archivists to see the reaction of patrons without investing a lot of money.
In the evening, my family and I visited the Speed Art Museum. I don’t “get” art, but I appreciate it! The Museum had excellent displays with panels explaining themes and history for those of us who want to know more, but like being told rather than interpreting it any way we wish. We took a guided tour where the guide explained modern art in a way that made me actually enjoy it (usually I skip anything post Impressionism). So, one up on increasing my cultural astuteness!
Posted by Nicole / Tags: conference, MAC