The Process of Discovering

So, at this point of the internship we are still doing some preliminary work to prepare for the real preparation of the exhibit. I've been assigned to work on the French exhibit at this point, because it is coming up sooner than the Mediterranean exhibit. The work I've done so far is to literally research items in Mirlyn having to do with France. Which is a little vague, but I've been getting better and better at finding interesting things. We're eventually going to be talking with some professors and other professionals involved with the exhibit, which will help narrow our search a bit, but I suppose it will be helpful to have an idea of what objects we do have in the museums. I began by searching "France" for objects that predated the 1900's. I wrote a bunch of objects down but I'd eventually have to find them and search through them to see if they had anything worthy of display, as well as its physical ability to be displayed (we don't have very large cases to showcase items, and the large cases we do have have a divider down the center where the cases are opened). After writing down a bunch of names in French (a language I can only somewhat decipher because of my background in Italian and Spanish), I decided that I needed a little more direction.

I began to research the cartographer's of the objects I found in Mirlyn and came up with a very interesting discovery. One of the cartographers I found, Nicolas Sanson, is notable because he taught cartography to both Louis XIII and Louis XIV. In fact, Louis XIII was so close to Sanson, that he was noted for requesting to stay with him on his visits to his home town as opposed to larger accommodations suited for kings.

I learned to love going to the Special Collections library so much, that I began to look for objects on France that could be found there, and have since been spending a good deal of my time sifting through books that are 300 and 400 years old!

My First Blog

I applied for this internship because it seemed relevant to my field and it sounded pretty interesting. I will be honest and say that I actually didn't know a lot about the Maps Library or what exactly I'd be involved in doing if I were to work there. I've been to the Maps Library once before in an Art History class on Medeival societies that I took my sophomore year. We went to go check out the Hereford Map, which was a map we had been discussing in class. It wasn't the real Hereford Map, but it was a copy and it was definitely very cool to see it in person.

The first day at the internship, Karl (my internship coordinator) gave me a stack of books about maps to look through. At first it seemed a little tedious and boring, but I started to make my own observations about map making and how our perceptions of the world have changed over time. Surveying land and collecting enough information to create a map must have been a very tedious and hard job to do without the capabilities of aerial views. I begun to wonder if most map makers cheated a bit by copying off of each other. And then I realized that that was absolutely true, as some of the earlier representations of the world are so far off, and it wouldn't be a coincidence that many of the maps shared some characteristics. It's easy to look at these maps and laugh at how far off they are from the truth, but I can honestly say that being a cartographer is not on my to-do list and I have a lot of respect for those who fronteired the field.

Every third Thursday of the month, the Maps Library holds an open house, and that happened to be yesterday when I went in to work. The focus of the open house was on islands, and it was my responsibility to use Google Earth to find some interesting islands to potentially pull out maps for the open house. Karl took us over to a cabinet holding the special collections, and nonchalantly began to search through Napoleonic maps from the Clinton collection. I can't help but see these maps as pieces of art, and historical importance. When he told me I could start looking through them, I was amazed. I was worried I might rip them or hurt them and Karl reassured me that they are much sturdier than I'd think. I guess this is what it's like to work within the museum world... maybe someday my reverence for these objects will dissipate, but at this point that seems impossible.