INTERNSHIP CHECK-IN

Internship Check-In | Annie McCarron

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With all that is going on in the world right now, many of our summers have not turned out the way we originally planned. Usually, in the summer between 1^st and 2^nd year, MMSt students embark on an internship within a cultural heritage organization in order to gain hands on experience within their chosen environment. This year, with the restrictions in place, many opportunities were placed on hold or eliminated completely.  However, a few of my fellow classmates were fortunate enough to find internships to complete this summer in different aspects of the cultural sector. I recently sat down with two students from the 2021 cohort, Jessica and Alynese, to talk about their internships and how COVID-19 has impacted the internship experience for them.

Jessica Lanziner is currently doing her internship remotely as the Research Fellow at the Museum of Health Care. Knowing nothing about healthcare, she applied on a whim after LinkdIn creeping someone from her undergraduate degree, who she noticed had the position before.

Workplace set-up. Photo courtesy of Jessica Lanzier

Jessica: I noticed it said you don’t need to know anything about healthcare – I know nothing, but the internship was still going forward and it’s a stipend pay so I applied and got a call back which was awesome. It's not what I was planning, but it’s a huge research role, and I am learning a lot that I never thought I would be learning about. I had to apply to the fellowship with a topic, propose a research idea, and I figured let’s be timely and connect it to the current COVID-19 pandemic. I selected the history of PPE and Infectious diseases in Canada, looking at PPE and how it has evolved. Since I knew that museums would not be opening I proposed to do things entirely remotely.

AM: Where did you gain inspiration for your research topic?

Jessica: Like lots of people, I had been reading a lot during lockdown. I read the Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris, a scholar with a PhD in the History of Science, Medicine & Technology from the University of Oxford. I read her book and went off of that, listening to different talks and podcasts she had been on. She was on the Joe Rogan podcast, blowing his mind explaining the history of surgery. From this appearance she gained a large following. For my research proposal, I thought I will make it timely and do PPE and Infections, and explore the history of the use of PPE within Canada in regards to infections diseases.

Jessica’s current manuscript, titled after some reworking, is called “Histories of Personal Protective Equipment and Strategies in the Fight to Control Infectious Disease,” which once completed will be available on the Museum of Healthcare Website (where you can also see past Research Fellow Manuscripts). As a research fellow, Jessica is required to write a large paper at the end of her fellowship and create 4 blog posts about aspects of her research.

AM: What is your paper about?

Jessica: The history of different PPE and how it has evolved. The last chapter is on infectious disease outbreaks and how we have managed them in Canada using the history of PPE from before. My manuscript will look at Canadian responses to the 1918 influence, HIV, Tuberculosis, Sars, COVID-19. It's weird that I am currently living my research. For COVID-19, no archival materials are available so it’s all my own pictures and such.

AM: What have you found challenging about this experience?

Jessica: It’s been hard because I eat sleep and breathe pandemic. It's good and I have learned a lot but it makes me frustrated in my daily life. Stuff we have known to be science since the 1880s is not new or difficult! Because in their galleries they currently have vaccines and infectious disease information so it will be interesting to see how they will incorporate the stuff from this year.

AM: What interesting facts have you learned?

Jessica: [about] Respirators and disposable respirators. In the past, they had a similar issue to today with people being like my child is afraid of wearing masks, kids very afraid of gas masks so [the government] decided to make child friendly gas masks modelled off of Mickey mouse, that has ears and polka dots, and it makes them even more scary. They didn’t end up using them, there are still some in military archives, so they are hard to find but even more scary than a regular gas mask.

AM: Have you encountered any difficulties in your research?

Jessica: I have been conscious in trying to talk about how epidemics affect different racial groups in Canada, but I am only finding limited resources online. Papers just aren’t available for research online, it's hard to find diverse viewpoints about how historically pandemics affected minority communities in Canada. It's been frustrating, but that’s how it is with doing online research right now. Since I can’t go into the archives I have to rely on just what I can find online.

AM: Any advice for future people in your role?

Jessica: Not advice, but we all need to give more credit to those students who have spent their time doing those boring hours on long digitization projects, the only thing online saving us right now! Manual labour from cataloging students is really paying off for me right now.

AM: What skills have you employed from classwork?

Jessica: In our indigenous material heritage course, we looked at questions of who created this heritage and what does it mean for people to be using it who are from a different culture? I have been trying to follow the things from there and use broader viewpoints within my research.

AM: Anything surprising in what you have learned?

Jessica: I am learning a lot about copyright! I have had to deal with copyright and infringement, and that made me realize I wasn’t always doing it right before. I have learned how to actually get rights for images and reproduction rights, I’ve had to email a ton of places for certain images and I have become attached to having certain images! Some places like the city of Toronto allow you to use them for free for research if they’re online. I have been very attached to getting the correct photo rights!

Alynese Nightingale is interning at Lambton House Museum as an Archives Technician.

Lantern Slide/Glass negative from Lambton House Museum. Photo courtesy of Alynese Nightingale

AM: Tell me about your internship position.

Alynese: I applied in late April and didn’t hear back until June. I’m an Archive Technician – they merged two positions. I am by myself everyday, go in to do what I need to do, no one bothers me or anything. They usually hire two interns but only one this year —due to COVID-19 they have combined the positions. Since I am working alone I get to go into the office everyday. I am very lucky that the pandemic has not affected the daily roles of my job.

AM: What a day in the life looks like for you?

Alynese:  I am organizing collections so I like to start by going back and double checking my work from the pervious day for any mistakes. I don’t have concrete things I need to do everyday, I have creative control so I can choose what to work on. Today I finished cleaning out the archive room and started organizing collections which I will spend the next few weeks doing. I am helping the Lambton House Museum create a foundation for their archives, putting collection management policies in place, making finding aids so that museum workers can access things and researchers can come in. Doing that and getting it into an online database so it's all catalogued, they currently do not have accession numbers, so I'm creating a system for them that works and is easy for researchers and museum staff to navigate. I have been applying a lot of what I’ve learned in collections management from this past year.

I have always wanted to do collections so I was very excited for the opportunity when they were like “here are all of our collection things, do something with it!” In smaller museums sometimes collections are neglected for other more important things, and now I have time to focus on this and get it organized.

At the end of the week I do a report on what I did that week. I like the work because I can listen to music and podcasts! I listened to a lot of Dateline but it started to get too heavy so switched to Things You Missed in History Class.

AM: What is your favourite aspect of the job so far?

Alynese: Accessioning, going through and doing inventory reports, itemizing. I like seeing a new historical thing for the first time, it’s exciting to be the first person to see it.

AM: Is there anything that has surprised you about the job?

Alynese: I am surprised by how much control they have given me and how much they respect my opinion, not treating me like a student – they are treating me like an expert in the field and they are confident in the schooling and experience I have to do the job.

AM: What are you most excited to accomplish?

Alynese: I am most excited to accomplish organizing the collection. I am excited to create a concrete policy they can follow in the future, and have an impact on the organization and to be able to contribute a legacy to the future.

AM: What are some of the interesting objects you have found in the collection so far?

Alynese: Lots of photographs of the Humber River area and lots of cool photography glass negatives from the Kodak Archives showcasing the Humber River area, very cool. They have around 400 glass negatives or lantern slides showcasing very cool historic photos or paintings from the early 1900s. They are film negatives that layer onto a piece of glass and encased and can slide into a projector.  They cover scenes of the Humber River, paintings, children’s drawings on a project for pollution, houses in the area that students went and took pictures of, lots of different areas of local history that they have recorded.

Lantern Slide/Glass negative from Lambton House Museum. Photo courtesy of Alynese Nightingale

AM: Any advice for future people in your position?

Alynese: Keep a lot of notes and be really organized because it is easy to get confused! I have had plenty of times where I work on something and get disorganized and have to start over, so I have learned the importance of detailed notes!

The interviews have been edited for length and clarity. 

ENVIRONMENTAL, ECONOMIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS: ALUMNI CHECK-IN WITH RODERICK MACLEAN

Alumni Check-In | Elizabeth Cytko

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Roderick MacLean poses at the Halifax Citadel with historical interpreter Juan Rivadeneira.
Photo taken by J. Whattam.
Photo courtesy of Roderick MacLean.

Roderick MacLean is the Executive Director of the Halifax Citadel Society. He graduated from the Museum Studies program in 1997. He is also the Board Chair, manager and a playing member of the 78th Highlanders (Halifax Citadel) Pipe Band, and has won numerous awards in recognition of piping excellence.

What is your favourite memory from your time in the Museum program?

I suppose the funniest memory I have is from Sue Maltby’s conservation course. For the section on artifact condition reports she took us to the Canadian Museum of Health and Medicine in Toronto (now it's The Museum of Healthcare in Kingston.) We filed into this standard meeting room and we sat down in front of these little white boxes. We all took the lids off our boxes and there was complete silence around the room. Each of us had a wax, resin model of a syphilis infected penis or tongue and I think everybody was looking at their model and wondering if they had the only one. Then one of my classmates said in a loud voice “It’s a PENIS!” And then we all burst out laughing at the situation. That’s one of the stand-out, quirky moments from the program that I remember.

What has changed in museums from the time you graduated to now?

I know I’m certainly more aware of two things now than I was when I started working in the sector. The first is the need to balance entertainment and education in programming. I think I was solidly in the “must be educational” camp when I first starting working and the entertainment aspect was a “nice-to-have”. Without the balance between the two, though we can't expect to bring people back and attract new audiences. The second is the availability of visitor survey data, especially large data-set work happening in the US, that I am starting to rely on fairly heavily in order for background in decision making. In the first case, I think this is more a change in my awareness than a change in the sector itself, good programming probably always balanced the educational and entertainment value for visitors. The second example may be more sector-wide and I find it extremely valuable to have solid, data-driven evidence in planning and, where appropriate, making the case for change.

What does a typical day entail at your job?

It spans the gamut from working on new projects, mapping plans, working through budgets, meeting with people, or I'm out, walking around the grounds to see how our staff is doing. On occasion in the fall period when we're still quite busy and a lot of our staff have returned to school I'm also assisting  in program delivery with historic clothing. This morning I was help take delivery of about 20 barrels of gin, rum and whisky which are being aged at the site as part a partnership we’ve just recently struck with a local distillery - so there’s rarely a dull moment.

What are your budgeting tips?

Always build in a contingency.

What are the best ways to build a good relationship with your/a board of directors?

My suggestion for positive Board relationship-building is to get a system of governance in place that spells out specifically what each of your roles entail. About eight or ten years ago we instituted such a system called Policy Governance® which is also sometimes known as the “Carver Model” after its creator and it has worked quite well for us. The system spells out specifically what the role of management is, and what the role of the board is. It allows you to help the board in a very sort of defined way, and also tells the board what it can and cannot do with regard to management's work. So I would say the best way to build a good relationship is to have a clear idea of what each of your roles is, and stick to that.

A view of the Halifax Citadel
Photo courtesy of Evelyn Feldman

What do you find most fulfilling about your work?

Working with a young staff. There’s that enthusiasm and eagerness that's associated with new people that come in who are pretty passionate about our program. That's a real energizer. My position allows me to see people progress through our program year after year. It's a really cool thing to see people progress through a program that way where they started as people who didn't really know the job, and then become people who are really confident and are passing on their knowledge to the next generation of staff.

What is one of your failures that was a great learning experience?

When I think about my experience of leadership specifically, I believe I had a series of mini-failures especially at the beginning of assuming successive leadership roles. These have informed my belief that you can take all the courses you want and read all the books out there on the subject but nothing really teaches you about leadership adequately until you are actually doing it. One’s leadership style is unique and changes over time. I think of it sort how folklorists define the concept of tradition, that is, as a constant process of selection and re-selection. If you apply the same kind of idea to my experience of leadership, then it's sort of a constant process of many mini-failures. I just fail in different and (hopefully!) better ways as time goes on.

What are some of the long-term trends that you think young museum professionals need to be aware of?

I think it’s interesting to think about how larger environmental, economic, cultural and technological trends will affect cultural institutions down the road. Take one of the biggest ones - climate change - and what impact that might have on transportation, the physical well-being of museum buildings and collections and on visitation patterns. As a micro-example, in Nova Scotia the visitor season is extending further into the fall, and we're getting better weather going into September, October and November. What is that going to mean for us? If that continues for five or ten, or fifteen years, are people going to adjust their visitation patterns to seek that better weather in the fall period? One of the impacts to our site is that, if the University year remains as it is, then we're going to have problems with offering the same amount of service in the fall period as we do in the summer period. So that's a consideration.

With regard to the economic and cultural, we deal with a lot of cruise ship traffic here in Halifax and that visitation has been growing for quite a long time. We're not at the same point as a place like Barcelona, and some other really well known visitor sites, but just the impact of tourism, especially fast tourism, as the baby boomers retire even further, and a lot of them decide to travel as well, what impact that's going to have on historic sites and museums? In some ways that is a good problem to have, because you’ll have an increasing number of people wanting to see these places, but it also presents dilemmas for many places with regards to transportation and accommodation.

I also wonder about the effect of technology, artificial intelligence and robots specifically, and what effect that will have in our sector. Whether there are opportunities to add robots in museum settings, and what that means for programming and museum labour. On the one hand, it might be a way to offer a lot more information to a lot more people. On the other, I feel it's really the person to person interaction in historic sites and museums that's the most important thing that we can offer. So the increasing use of AI and robots ten to twenty years from now might mean that it's even more important to have that personal aspect in information delivery and programming in cultural institutions because people will be looking for opportunities for real, human interaction even more in the future.

Finally, and I’m not sure if this an answer to the “trend” question or just a general “heads-up,” I would like to put a plug in for the work of Colleen Dillenschneider. She's working for a company called IMPACTS Research and Development in the U.S. and they're looking at fairly large-scale data sets of surveys, from people visiting all sorts of cultural attractions in the U.S. They’re extracting all kinds of, pretty useful data, some of which I would think confirms what people in the museum sector are already aware of anecdotally. She's the only person I know of who's publishing this stuff in that way. I've looked for Canadian and European equivalents, but I can't find any. I think everybody should really check out her blog. It’s really great stuff, I think.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.