Night at the Museum

First we went to the Museum of History at the Collin’s Barracks and got to see some of the “behind the scenes” stuff. The Museum is always closed on Mondays so we got to see a lot of the internal work that goes on. We went past the conservation room and saw them repairing some old furniture, and then saw the small Natural History exhibit they had there (since the main Natural History Museum is closed) and met some of the people who are working on cataloguing all the Museum’s specimens.

Next we went to one of their storage facilities, which is massive! There are so many boxes of specimens and artifacts there that Nigel (the Keeper) told us some of the crates that they acquired as far back as the 1960s still haven’t even been opened! Crazy! It was amazing to realize that the “small” amount of artifacts and specimens the Museum has on display is really only one small portion of all that they really have.

We got to see one area where they were working on cleaning different bones they had gotten and a store room that was filled with animal bones, such as huge antlers and whale ribs and what not. I don’t think I ever mentioned too that when I went in for my interview and took a tour of the Natural History Museum I got to see some of Charles Darwin’s actual collections that he himself gathered and labeled and then donated to the Museum. I LOVE working in a place that has so much amazing history! Even the building itself holds tons of history with it being over 150 years old.

Tuesday we worked a little bit in the galleries helping to catalogue specimens. It was amazing- we were opening cases and handling specimens that literally hadn’t been touched in a hundred years! Then we closed up the cases that probably won’t be opened again for another hundred years! It’s just amazing for me to look at some rare coral specimen and see the record number on the side of it’s base, knowing that I was the one who placed that label there! Hehe.

We also had an opportunity Tuesday to take a tour of the Archaeological Museum, which is just down the street from the Natural History Museum. I was actually a little disappointed in this Museum- I had been so excited because I’ve always been interested in archaeology, but I was actually a little bored with it. Plus the tour wasn’t very good. Instead of giving a tour of the expanse of the museum they really just focused on ten or so key items and really went in depth with them. I would have rather the tour been highlighting more items and not going as in depth.

All my coworkers are really nice and really good at including us in on tea breaks and whatnot. Oh, that’s the other thing I love! The Irish LOVE their tea breaks! Which means not only do I get an hour lunch, but also a half-hour tea break around 11a- it really helps to break up the day. They’re all really chill and relaxed here too. We were asking how long our lunch break is and they said they at least take a half hour, but normally an hour or two! Then they said if we ever wanted to take a three-hour break or something to go have lunch with a friend in town then that would be fine! The other day we all went to the café in the Archaeological Museum and had an hour tea break! Hehe

By the way, when I keep saying “we” I mean Blair and I. I’m not sure if I mentioned before that there’s another girl from the BU/Dublin program who is also interning at the Natural History Museum with me. But Blair doesn’t actually go to BU but some small liberal arts college in North Carolina (?). It’s kind of nice having someone else there with me as we experience all these new things together.

Wednesday and Thursday were much less eventful as we basically spent the entire day cataloguing and archiving old museum correspondence. This is fun for the first couple hours, but then gets pretty boring after that. I’m currently working with the correspondence between 1966 and 1970. So what I’m basically doing is reading all the letters that were sent to and from the museum during this time period and then writing up the key information (date, sender, receiver, letter summary) in an excel spreadsheet. Nigel says the point is basically so if some family member of a contributor ever comes and wants to get a specimen back that their great-grandfather or whatever gave to the Museum, we can easily find the correspondence showing the grandfather actually donated, not lent, the specimen to the Museum.

A lot of what we read is people wanting different things identified though, or scientists looking to borrow different specimens for their research. Some of them are pretty interesting though- I got to read one letter from Charles Darwin’s great-grandson! My favorite by far though is the person who sent in a spider asking for it to be identified. The Museum proceeded to send him a letter back saying they couldn’t identify it given that it was actually a fake ‘joke’ spider from a toy store! Haha. I laughed pretty hard at that one! Imagine how stupid that guy must have felt when he got that response back!

After work on Thursday Nigel said we’d be working on some different things next week to help diversify the day a bit- so hopefully next week will have a bit more variety!

written by  kmr788 on June 11, 2009 from Dublin, Ireland
from the travel blog: Dublin, Ireland
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