Friday, August 30, 2019

Hello World!

     Hello, my name is Rachel Baldwin and I am a fourth year Anthropology/Sociology and Museum Studies double major. I'm interested in history, science, and technology museums and how they engage visitors. It's interesting how they handle visitors of different ages, ethnicities, and abilities. I'm also interested in socioeconomic inequality and immigration in the US. I've also held and interest in LGBTQ+ studies and gender studies. Outside of my majors, I love to do martial arts, watch cartoons and shows, and paint on occasion. 
     I'm still very new to the Museum Studies field, but I've had a little experience to help me. This past summer, I had an internship with the Genesee Country Village and Museum (GCV&M). I worked in collections cataloging new acquisitions, inventorying the collection, taking photographs of objects, helping to create a public digital database, moving objects, and doing minor cleaning and polishing of objects. I also had the opportunity to write a small essay about an object of my choosing, a police lantern, that was posted to a social media blog. I was lucky to have interned there and I learned so much about working in a museum, the GCV&M helped me so much! I've also taken a class called the Legal and Ethical Issues of Collecting which taught me many of the skills I used in my internship and helped me contextualize the work I did. Below is an image of the Wehle Galley at GCV&M.

Thursday, August 29, 2019