Isabella: Penn Museum Lectures and Conversations with Tufuku

For today, my morning was dedicated to hearing lectures from representatives from the Development, Marketing, and Visitor Services departments. Each gave really interesting, in-depth looks at departments I was very unfamiliar with today. After listening to the lectures from the representatives at Development, I became more interested in considering development as a potential career path. In this position, I would be able to support the survival of the museum and its future projects while getting to travel and meet new people all the time. Continually, I was fascinated by the presentation given by the Visitor services department. One comment that really caught my attention was the idea that language is essential for visitor services in order to make the museum experience as accessible as possible for every guest. The importance of specific, accessible language goes beyond just the labels beneath the objects. The incredible intentionality of language can be seen on every sign, map, and greeting from visitor service employees. I will never neglect again how much precise work it takes to get me, a guest, to feel comfortable and engaged at a museum.

In our conversation with Tufuku, I felt much more confident that the work I'm doing is effective and useful. I also have a much clearer vision of the final product in our head. Now that we established how to embed links into the object spreadsheets and how each document informs the other, I feel very grounded in the work and understand where to put my energies in the upcoming days. By the end of the internship, we will create a master object lists that link to both the History of the Collections Reference sheet and to specific documents providing info for individual donors. All of our research is now interconnected. It is just a matter of plugging all of the information in and presenting it to Dr. Zuberi. I feel good about the work ahead.