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!