Thursday, March 17, 2011

Picture a Museum Day!

Today is Picture a Museum Day on flickr and Twitter. So I thought I would share some behind the scenes photos from around the museum.

The white board in the museum office contains information about upcoming exhibits, and, today, has the tenets of the museum's mission written on it to help us think about educational programming to develop for school groups.
Picture a Museum Day

Into the workroom, where we put together many of our exhibits. This wide format printer and Mac are where all the text panels and labels we develop come from.
Picture a Museum Day

And where we keep our vinyl cutter and rolls of colored vinyl. Those exhibit titles on the wall? Come from here.
Picture a Museum Day

Not to mention risers and plexi mounts not currently in use.
Picture a Museum Day

When they're not in the gallery, we keep our display cases in our work space, or where ever we can find the room.
Picture a Museum Day

In our archives room, we keep, well, archives. This collection is from L.H. Walker, a collector and doctor who lived in Ellensburg.
Picture a Museum Day

In all of our spaces, we keep dataloggers which taken a reading of the temperature and relative humidity every 90 seconds. This one is in the collections room.
Picture a Museum Day

From the collection: Crepe paper dolls representing cultures around the world and mythological figures. They were made by student teachers here at CWU in the 1940s and 1950s.
Picture a Museum Day

From the collection: A row of stereoscopes.
Picture a Museum Day

Display cases in the collections room - we keep them everywhere!
Picture a Museum Day

After taking these photos, I climbed into our Wenas Creek Mammoth display to change the lights (which had burned out). I left some very realistic boot prints in the dirt! It's a bit nerve wracking to be stepping around ancient mammoth bones (yes! that's a real bone!) but it's just another day in the life of the collections manager. And while we had the case open, a quick picture of the display from the back - the secret entrance.
Picture a Museum Day 2011

Happy Picture a Museum Day!

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