Service Learning Update: Maddie Hagerman, UW-Madison Anthropology Collections

With support from the Caxambas Foundation, the Material Culture Program is once again sponsoring three undergraduate summer service learners. Each student has partnered with a Wisconsin museum or historical society to help them digitize and share their collections online. Our first update comes from Anthropology major Maddie Hagerman.

For my Summer Service Learning internship, I’m continuing my student job in the Anthropology Collections at UW-Madison. I work with Senior Curator Danielle Benden as a collections assistant with the ethnographic artifacts. The first part of my project entails making mounts for the nearly six hundred ethnographic artifacts in the collection. In the second phase I began the process of publishing the ethnographic artifacts to UW Digital Collections to better attract potential researchers.

The ethnographic collection contains artifacts from around the world amassed in the field by UW graduate students and professors. Because many of them are composed of organic materials, the artifacts ideally should be stored in closed archival boxes. When I began, most of the artifacts were kept in open shelving, simply protected by tissue paper. To provide the artifacts with the optimal protection, I mounted them on either “blue board,” an archival cardboard, or carved individual ethafoam supports. I designed this basket mount to stabilize both the bottom and sides of the basket. The archival linen “twill tape” only applies pressure on the foam rather than the fragile basket.

The digitization process is more involved than I could have imagined. Right now I’m photographing each object with a Nikon D300 camera and a professional lighting system. Before I could start to photograph, I created a unique nomenclature for our collection. A nomenclature consists of a standardized set of terms to describe objects. This helps to make the artifacts more easily searchable within the digital collections database. In August I will continue to photograph artifacts. I also have to check over the metadata (information such as time, place, and materials) for each artifact to make sure it is correct.  

I'm thoroughly enjoying my summer internship. My favorite part is designing mounts. It really pushes me to think critically about protecting objects while still conserving paper and other supplies. The digitization process has challenged me to work with data entry rather than physical objects. I hope to be a collections manager some day so building off my coursework in material culture, anthropology, and history to learn digital aspects of collections management will be very useful in the future!

--Maddie Hagerman