It's been a while

Well hello readers! I am so sorry for neglecting you all again!
This semester has been a trying semester. Take this internship add two upper level history courses and a General Anthropology course plus my 3 days a week job at Disney (that has me working anywhere from 4-15 hours a day) plus my relationship plus my mother's health issues and you've got the perfect recipe for madness! ;)

Anyways, enough of my pity party, I suppose I should update you all on what I've been up to.

Well I've pretty much wrapped up my finding aid. I need to add the historical background information on the museum as a whole, and the individual collections. Once I do this it will pretty much be complete.
I've been contacted by a graduate student wanting to do some research on the GLBT history in the mills/50 (ViMi District). I felt bad because as I've just been inventorying the collection I don't really know much information about the history. I can say that I know The Center has a relatively long history at their current location, but prior to being located on Mills, they were on 50. I can say that there was once a GLBT book store called Out and About Books located off of Mills. I know there is a store called Ritzy Rags. All these things I can say, but I do not know the entire history of each location. Nor do I really have the time to investigate the whole history of these locations. My responsibilities have had me inventorying the collection and making it more accessible for researchers, so that they can uncover the history for the public. That's not to say that I have not gathered a decent understanding of the history of our community. I certainly have, and I feel like I, myself, have gained much more appreciation for our community through this internship. Anyways, the whole point of that rant was to connect it to my finding aid. Once I've finished my finding aid (which I anticipate having completed by Sunday). I will thus make it accessible to the researcher who has inquired about the collection. I will also offer up a time to meet with her so that I can give her a basic understanding as to what items are what. Hopefully I can aid in her research!

The other thing I've been working on is a plan of action for the GLBT History Museum of Central Florida. In my plan of action I basically address certain things that I've learned about during this internship. Things such as the importance of having a acquisition policy. Should the museum accept items on loan? Or should they only accept donations? Or both? This is important because if a museum accepts an item on loan they have to consider certain issues. Issues such as "who is responsible for insuring the item? The museum? Or the Loaner?" or even "Who is responsible for storing the item? The museum? or the loaner?" These are all little details that have to be considered when creating an acquisition policy. For the most part the GLBT History Museum of Central Florida has an official policy, but they have not decided whether or not they will accept items on loan.
In my plan of action, I also include my thoughts and ideas. Such as networking with other museums throughout the state and country (even the world). I've also included ideas on obtaining more history from the community, and some other ideas and opinions.

I think the plan of action is my favorite part. I get to take all that I've learned this semester about archiving and public history, and I get to actually show what I've learned. It's one thing to have the collection inventoried and organized, but to write up my recommendations and actually have them coming from my experience and research is pretty exciting. It certainly makes me feel like I know what I'm talking about and like I've actually learned from this whole experience. I love it!

The other thing I have left to do is to actually rehouse the Brian Arbogast collection! This will be pretty exciting! I start working on that next week!

For now I leave you all to go work on some Anthropology reading before I head into my part time job at Disney! Take care and have a great weekend!

-Kyle the intern