So with the beginning of week three of my internship, I
started in earnest to develop a project team for our interpretive plan. Of
course, the week was stalled somewhat by the Memorial Day Holiday; in the end,
I was only able to make it to the Sanford museum on Friday (though I’m not
about to complain about a 3-day weekend).
My week was nonetheless still fruitful. On Wednesday
afternoon, I placed a call to Laura Keim. Laura is the curator of the Stenton
House Museum in Philadelphia, PA. She is also one of the architects of the
Stenton House interpretive plan (which is conveniently posted to their website
– any would-be interpretive planners would be advised to check it out). We
spoke for about half an hour and engaged in many aspects of the planning
process. My first question, however, was how to assemble a project team. What
did the project team do? When did they do it? And who did what? How did the
scholarly consultants and museum staffers work together? Or did they? I
garnered a clear sense of how a team should collaborate on the creation and
implementation of an interpretive plan. Laura also made something else clear:
an excellent institutional
interpretive plan would take between 9 months and a year to complete. A good interpretive plan, if started
today, still couldn’t be completed before New Year’s. Even a shoddy
plan couldn’t be churned out by the end of Summer Semester (August 2nd).
So that news brought me back to my original question – what can I do this summer that would be
meaningful to the museum?
When I finally did arrive at the PHC on Friday, I relayed
Laura’s advice to Dr. Beiler. A (mostly) completed sophisticated interpretive
plan was looking increasingly elusive within the brief timeline of the
internship. So, back to grant-writing, an idea that was thrown around initially
during the first few days of the semester.
My new goal is to complete a competent first draft of an
America’s Historical and Cultural Organizations Planning Grant for the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Public Programs. The planning grant
(if all goes well) would avail the museum with $40,000 to support, among other
things, “preliminary design for any of the interpretive formats to be used” and
“meeting with scholars and other content advisers, program partners, and
audience representatives.” Perfect! The grant would provide the resources for
the PHC to develop a sophisticated interpretive plan for the museum. With my attention
now shifted to the NEH grant for the remainder of the semester. The remaining
hours of Friday afternoon was spent developing an action plan to complete this
task.
First things first, we needed to establish a consensus about
what the museum’s strengths are moving forward. I am hardly capable of making
these decisions alone, so my first step was to reach out to UCF faculty and
relevant local scholars. We needed to take a group tour and decide, once and
for all, what themes we intend to emphasize in the future (and which I will
need to highlight in the grant). I left Friday afternoon with the intent of
reaching out to these scholars first thing Monday.
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