Day 18, February 17th

I continued working on Box 5.

In terms of the different ways that archives can be used, we had one patron who was learning about the house that he was working on. The man was a college landlord, who was dividing up this house into four apartments, and he was interested in learning about the house.

The house was once a college female dormitory, and it was a TKE frat house all the up to last semester. It was cool to hear about the history of this house. Kind of makes me think about where I'm from, where the oldest houses were built in the 1950's. And in the college town I did my undergrad in, where they keep tearing down houses to put up new apartment buildings with retail on the first floor. That's one thing I really like about this area- there are so many older houses around, with more character than one could find in the cookie-cutter suburbia of Bear, Delaware.

Day 19, February 18th

I watched another tour of the museum. It's definitely good practice to see how guides can get the visitors to relate to the material.

We had a discussion about some Operation Desert Storm trading cards that had been donated by this very eager young kid who had discovered them in a hobby shop. The problem was that there's always a full set of cards, and the museum doesn't really need them. But how exactly can you turn a donation down? That seems to be a continual problem- with the limitations of space and budget, can or should an archives save everything they're given?