Teaching an Oldish Dog New Tricks

The fun and challenging part of doing an internship, and a large part of its value, is the opportunity to move from theory to practice. After years of reading about museums and exhibit design, I am working though how a proposal gets developed, with the people who will be considering the value (and as I write up iteration one of my proposal) practicality of the idea. Proposing an exhibition in a classroom is a good thinking exercise, as you know nothing will come of it. The possibility of a potential exhibit is much more stress.

I have been developing a report on websites and exhibits, delving into not just exhibits and collections, but how the museums present themselves and introduce themselves to the online visitor. The first part of the task was filling out an evaluation form from my internship team, and an assignment to look at and evaluate several sites. Over the past month, I have viewed around fifty sites, with fourteen of them in the report I am writing. This part of the assignment falls on old skill sets, reviewing websites against a checklist, albeit a somewhat poorly defined one. I added the criteria for NCPH reviews of digital projects to help frame my thinking.

The second project I anticipate working on after the awareness campaign will be a mapping problem, which I am looking forward to. I have taken classes on ARCGIS, and I an excited about putting it to use in a real study. I am comfortable with software, it’s building the dataset that intrigues me. Students are always given a predefined set, so defining and creating the associated data set will flex my abilities and learning opportunity.