Week Three: Switching Gears

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 2^nd). 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.