Posted by Kim:
If you have never experienced working in a museum setting, you may not know that the total of the artifacts in a museum are grouped into "collections". You might also not be aware that caring for "the collections" is a fulltime job! In a small museum with limited staff, it can actually take decades of dedicated time and effort to properly house, record, and store your artifacts. And, since technology and science are always changing, just when you think it is finally all done -- it's time to update! Just to give you a small glimpse into what we take care of at the Frank Phillips Home -- in our collection we have about 3,000 books. Each one must be recorded, examined for wear and tear, photographed from different angles, and entered into our database system. We have been working on this for some time. Add to that all of the home's furnishings, art, decorative items, household items, attached fixtures, photographs, record albums, documents, toys, clothing . . . do you begin to see the challenge?
Fortunately for us, we have two very dedicated and talented volunteer archivists that have helped us tremendously with our efforts. Gary Nealis has many years of experience as a photo archivist and is also an expert in Bartlesville history. His most recent project at the home has been working with the Phillips' phonograph record collection to digitalize it. Our second volunteer archivist is Kathy Triebel. Kathy is a certified archivist and was the corporate archivist for Phillips Petroleum for many years. Kathy's most recent project has been to make protective archival coverings for all of our oversized objects. She has worked aggressively for several months to properly house many of the artifacts in the collection.
Aren't we lucky they want to work here?
