Today was my first official day of doing work. The morning was spent in an All-Staff meeting and after lunch I began sorting through a small collection that’s recently come in.
ALL-STAFF MEETING
The All-Staff staff meeting was my first good look at how this place works. There were 24 employees participating. It's my impression that there are lots of independent departments - I'm not sure who is who, and who works together. But beyond witnessing a real-live business meeting (first time ever), I learned some interesting facts.
Stats: It seems that no library anywhere has come up with an efficient and helpful way to keep relevant measures in this kind of environment. This has been an issue at every library I've ever worked in. How do we keep track of how well we are engaging our patrons? How do you measure patron satisfaction? One of the first things the man running the meeting mentioned was how they'd hired a Louisville-based "measurement instruments consultant.” User/Visitor statistics and analytics were mentioned again, later. I’m not sure how you get to be a “measurement instruments consultant,” but it seems like it’d be a good field to be in.
Foresight and Planning: Very impressive. Their strategic plan seems to actually be a functioning plan and not an aspirational document hidden in a drawer somewhere. Digitization is a key initiative and they've identified 4 target areas for potential digitization The French & Indian War collection, the portrait collection, the CT Soldiers' Orphans' Home collection and the Chinese Aid Mission collection. A large amount of the meeting was taken up discussing funding and revenue streams, membership numbers and corporate sponsors. Facilities management was another topic I hadn't considered. Because the museum is in a historic home there are a lot of maintenance issues I'd never really thought about - how DO you park a school bus in 1920s driveway?
Takeaways for the wannabe professional museum person
Money is always going to be an issue - learn how to budget wisely, write grants, and schmooze with donors. This might be the biggest one. Why don't they teach this in Library School?
Tech is huge - the future belongs to the librarian with digital projects experience, not just scanning and creating databases, though. Everyone wants those large scale "value added" projects that add markup or tags to existing digital collections. I believe these are usually built in-house from scratch e.g. NYPL Labs (What's On the Menu? & Building Inspector were mentioned). This concerns me. I know that I don't have these kinds of skills - I can barely wrap my head around the concepts.
Learn your community - The CHS is an organization in transition because of its unique location. The local community today in downtown Hartford differs greatly from the community that founded the historical society and donated their personal collections 100 years ago. CHS staff works hard to provide the local community with events and programs to attract their interest. This makes pragmatic sense (no visitors=no museum) but it's a nice thing to see in library professions – CHS is not just concerned with presidential researchers in tweed blazers. An aspiring professional would learn how to get out into her community, how to network promote herself. Outreach seems to be the way of the future and I can't expect to just sit in a basement somewhere alone with old books.
Learn to work in groups/be team player - these all seemed like big group projects with lots of moving parts. Everyone also had a large number of outside contacts, be they volunteer groups or other local non-profits. No one gets to just work by themselves.
After the meeting I got to work on a new collection. B handed me a file box about 2/3 full and (politely) told to figure it out... This is what I figured...
THE BULLARD FAMILY
Pratt students know this address!
This is a collection of family papers to/from/and related to the Bullard family. Edward Payson Bullard (1841-1906) was a Connecticut industrialist who founded a company (variously known as the Bullard Company, the Bridgeport Machine Tool Works, the Bullard Machine Tool Works, and the Bullard Machine Tool Company) that existed in some from 1862-1900 and employed over 2,000 workers. According to a semi-hagiographic biography published by the Bullard Company in 1955, Edward P. Bullard was a self-made man who worked his way up in the world. I think that CHS hoped this collection might have information about his business dealings or technical data, but so far I’ve only seen banal family documents e.g. recipes, religious material (prayers/hymns) and family correspondence, all dating to within 10-15 years.
I was most interested in a series of letters written home from Mrs. Bullard in 1900. Edward had brought his wife along on a trip to Paris’ Exposition Universelle” in 1900 - trip arranged by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The Bullard’s visited Britain, Paris and Germany and most of this collection is their letters home to their children.
The more entertaining of these letters were written by Mrs. Bullard, who seemed very concerned with maintaining social etiquette while travelling. She filled her letters with more details from the train trips and hotel rooms and she skipped over the more momentous events happening on their trip. I know I shouldn’t have spent so much time reading once I figured out what I had, but it was so interesting to see a London vacation through this woman’s eyes. Her husband had gone ahead, so on her transatlantic crossing she had to have roommates – there was an English Woman (“a very pleasant person,”) a Swiss Woman (“remarkably nice, pleasant,”) and “Mrs. Dr. Helmouth’s maid (sic).” who turned out to be “entirely unobjectionable.” Mrs. Bullard did not like the idea of an upper berth “but Mrs. Roberts preferred it.” Louise (the maid) couldn’t sleep on the couch with the porthole open... Halfway into a letter exclusively about customs, train tickets, and a batch of the most luscious strawberries (“the nicest I ever saw,”) Mrs. Bullard remarked casually, “I presume you all know that father is here attending the meetings of the mechanical engineers.” Then she turns immediately back to her previous topic. “The train service was part of our trip so it cost me nothing.”
The Bullard’s vacation is interesting to probably no one but me or someone writing a social history of London and wanted a middle-class American’s viewpoint, but I could read a book of her observations on daily life. I found them inadvertently ironic, rude, and hilarious. “Thursday we went out in the afternoon and had a two hour ride on the top of a bus…of course you can seeeverything!” She skipped the A.S.M.E. reception at the Guildhall (where her husband was honored by the Lord Mayor) to rest up for an excursion to Warwick Castle the following evening “by special train.” She met the Countess of Warwick (“very pretty woman with beautiful auburn hair”) along with the Earl (“A good-looking Englishman, not at all handsome.”)
MY NOTES ON FOLDERS/CONTENT (IN NON-DACS COMPLIANT MISHMASH)
Folder 1: Edward P. Bullard - Correspondence
Folder 2: Alice Martha Camp Bullard - Correspondence
Folder 3: Elizabeth Brewster - Correspondence
Folder 4: Jessie Bullard - Incoming Correspondence
Folder 5: Mrs. H. B. Clark (Jessie Bullard Clark) - Favorite Recipes
Folder 6: Lucy Camp Correspondence
Folder 7: Alice Martha Camp Bullard - Correspondence