Final project?
I'm not eating cereal in the MOHAI library. This box and others like it were stuffed with thousands of photographs and negatives. It took several months to organize, carefully number and write a finding aid for the Pacific Coast Cement Company Collection. You think cement manufacturing is boring? Think again. The modern city of Seattle was built with concrete.
This was the final in a long string of sometimes tedious but immensely satisfying projects. A perfect description of archival work.
The world changes, but at the same time, stays exactly the same. Human nature has not changed a whit in thousands of years, and history repeats itself endlessly.
I've volunteered in the archives at the Seattle Museum of History and Industry since 2009. This morning I typed "MOHAI" into that Google search box on the top of the blog and looked at all the posts I've written over the years about the museum.
It made me nostalgic, because my volunteer gig in the library is over for the foreseeable future. The head librarian is retiring, and unfortunately there's no plan to replace her position. I don't know what will eventually become of the library. I'm grateful for all the interesting projects she gave me and the gratification of seeing my finding aids published. (I know, that's just ego speaking, but we all have a bit of it.)
Of course, there's other volunteer opportunities at MOHAI and elsewhere, but I'm going to give it some thought before jumping into the next thing. In meantime, I need to find something useful to do with myself on Tuesday afternoons.
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