First Day!!

Just finished with my first work day. VERY tired. No internet at Cindy and Clay’s, so I’ve found myself a comfortable booth at the local gas station/dairy queen/coffee shop/liquor store, which is apparently Mitchell’s primary internet hotspot. Whoot whoot.
But let me explain how I got here. I arrived in Mitchell, SD last night and drove by the Dakota Discovery Museum and the Dakota Wesleyan University campus before heading out to Cindy and Clay Gregg’s house. I'm very excited to by staying with them. They're a very nice couple and the dirt roads and trees suit me much better than staying in a quiet apartment on campus.
I met my mentor Lori Holmberg at 9:30 this morning and got a lengthy tour of the museum. The first story is half historic gallery currently filled with Native American exhibits and pioneer settlement exhibits related to the Middle Border region, which includes North and South Dakota, and parts of Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska. The other half of the first floor is Discovery Land (a neat area for kids) and gift shop. The second floor features artwork by Oscar Howe (a nationally-acclaimed Native American artist from South Dakota) and Charles Hargens, another local artist. I get the feeling these names, as well as other local artistic, historic, and political heroes, will soon be as well-known to me as Ronald Reagan’s. 
    Lori is the only full-time staff member at the museum, which is open 5 days a week. They are closed Sunday and Wednesday, with Wednesday being known as ‘grunt day’ (aka we get all the hard labor done that day) Most of the museum is run by volunteers that work in 3 hour shifts throughout the week. I met one of the few part-time staffers, Courtney, who is about my age, as well as Larry the maintenance man, Jane, Pat, Karen, Imy, and Laurie, who are all loyal volunteers. It’s so great to see locals so involved in their community history. I swear Laurie drank an entire pot of coffee by herself in the three hours she was there, and God only knows how many she had before she came to work…half the energy in the museum was radiating from her front desk computer today.
    The best part of the museum tour was visiting the basement, where all the artifacts not on exhibit are stored. When Lori arrived at the museum a few years ago, everything was just sitting on wood pallets in the basement with little or no labeling and not in any kind of order. Now, for the most part, artifacts are shelved or put in ‘piles’ based on their materials. Wooden household furniture is covered in tarp and goes in this corner, kitchen items in that corner, paintings and pictures are either laid flat on those shelves, hung in these racks, or carefully wrapped and placed into folders in these cabinets, stuff like that. Unfortunately, though, there are a lot of miscellaneous piles and wooden pallets for things that just don’t have anywhere else to go. Best part is, I might be the only person here who really ENJOYS being in that basement, so I may be spending a lot of time going through all those items, giving them catalogue numbers, and listing them in the huge blue binders in the large black cabinet by the elevator that serves as our paper database. And once it’s all in the paper database, Courtney upstairs gets to go through it and enter it into the PastPerfect database on the computer. WOW! Slightly overwhelming, but also very exciting. About 80% of the museums artifacts are in the basement, and I’d say at least half of them are not yet properly entered into the paper database. There’s just so much stuff there! It’s hard to imagine trying to achieve all this cataloguing when you‘re trying to schedule local fundraisers, conservation events, and exhibit design with volunteers who are not computer savvy as a primary labor source.
    After my tour, Lori introduced me to the PastPerfect system that all the artifacts will be entered into once they are properly labeled and entered in the paper database/binder/cabinet. PastPerfect not only keeps track of all the artifacts, but EVERYTHING going on in the museum from contributor and member mailing lists to event planning and scheduling, volunteer hours, gift shop donations/sales and grant/funding records. It seems a lot like Eureka College’s Sonis program only MUCH bigger.    
    Another system I was introduced to was HOBOware. I’m sure HOBO stands for something cool, but I’m not sure what that is yet. Basically it’s a sensor system that records temperature, relative humidity, and light intensity throughout the museum. There are 18 sensors placed in the different art galleries, exhibit cases, the basement, and in the 3 historic buildings outside. (Oh sorry, forgot to mention that besides the museum itself, Dakota Discovery also includes a railroad depot, church, school, and beautiful Victorian house. I only got a brief look inside these buildings, but I’m hoping to see more of them this week.) Anyway, the HOBO sensors take readings every 60 seconds to record the temperature, humidity, and light in the museum to make sure the artifacts are receiving the correct amount of exposure that they require for the best preservation. Temperature doesn’t matter near as much as humidity and light. It was so cool watching Lori pull up all the current sensor readings on her computer. She also showed me each sensor’s readings over the past week to see how they have changed. For those who have seen it and know what I’m talking about, it looked a LOT like the readings and graphs Dad looks at when he fixes Mark Redekker’s robotic milker. And you guessed it, all that information can be saved and accessed through the PastPerfect database. The sensory data doesn’t change a whole lot, and isn’t really important on a day-to-day basis, but it's very helpful when considering new exhibits and applying for grants.
    Overall, I’m very excited to be here! Soooo many artifacts, and I got a promise from Lori that any time I want to go ‘dig around’, I can feel free to get lost in the basement any time I want to, as long as I wear gloves. There’s so much stuff down there! I found 3 boxes full of glass plate negatives with family portraits that nobody knows who they are or where they came from. I counted at least 4 pump organs and I’m dying to know if they still work. And finally, there is an entire CLOSET full of old Bibles written in all sorts of strange languages with the most intricate covers I have ever seen. One of the exhibits has a 16th century King James I just can’t wait to get my hands on!
    My first work day finally ended around 5:30...my first eight hour work day away from the farm. Not too bad. I plan to relax tonight when I get back to Cindy’s. Lori assured me the first day is quite overwhelming, but I’ll know my way around pretty well by the end of the week. Tomorrow is grunt day, so we'll be focusing on planning the Dakota Discovery Music Festival (scheduled for next Saturday) and preparing for a new exhibit upstairs that will feature wedding dresses from 1600-1920. Pretty neat! So glad I'm here!
Oh yes....pictures coming soon....still need a final word on what I can and cannot take pictures of. It is, after all, a museum. Hahahahaha!