Bicentennial Exhibit Development Internship Week 4

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project:

This week's update is much more exciting than my previous ones because we have made progress on the exhibit's development! On Tuesday (2/3), we had our first meeting with Dr. Crepeau, who is responsible for the creation of the collection in 1976! Our meeting was to get all of us familiar with Dr. Crepeau, and to walk through ideas about the exhibit, the collection itself, and the overall vision for the development of this project. The meeting was so fun, we got to look through some of the boxes that Dr. Crepeau had in his office, which included all sorts of fun and interesting historical "junk" from the Bicentennial year. Things like cereal boxes, magazines, sugar packets, soda cans, and much much more are part of this collection, and it was so fascinating to see the sheer volume of the collection. I did not realize truly how much stuff Dr. Crepeau had collected with his students that year, and I loved seeing everything we have to work with during this semester.

We mostly discussed the narrative of the collection, the vision of the exhibit, and the timeline/meeting schedule/deadlines in general. We were able to film a lot of what Dr. Crepeau said about the narrative of the collection, the students involved, the funny stories that went along with the collection process, and other relative information about UCF at the time. This information will be highly relevant to the creation of the narrative text on the exhibit that will contextualize the exhibit's foundational collection and the background of the historical "junk." We also discussed some of the items that we will absolutely want to include in the exhibit, since there will be a limit to how much we can physically display (because the collection is so comprehensive!). These items included posters from the exhibit in 2016 and a collection of fifty 7-Up cans that when assembled correctly display an image of Uncle Sam. I think this will definitely be the "shinning star" of the exhibit, and I know that the audience of the exhibit will love to see that display. 

After the general discussion of the meeting was completed regarding the development of the exhibit, we viewed more of the boxed collection in Dr. Crepeau's office, which was even more stuff! This largely included paper items like magazines, posters, etc. I still cannot believe how many items are in his collection, and that is not even all of it. The rest of the collection is in the UCF Archives and Special Collections, which we will be viewing next Wednesday (2/11). 

On Wednesday (2/4), all of the Public History Central interns received a tour of the UCF Archives and Special Collections, which was a wonderful experience. The staff in the Archives gave us some background of the jobs they have and how they came to work at UCF, which was very interesting and informative, especially for the interns who are interested in this field. We were also given a quick walk-through of the Archives collection, which was expansive. At the end of the tour, they took us down to the ARC, which is where are the books from the library are stored for student use. This was so interesting to see because I borrow books from the UCF Library often for research, but I had never had the opportunity to see the giant robot that retrieves them for me! I am so grateful for that tour, it was so informative and interesting, especially since I work at a library part-time but I do not have any experience in archival or cataloging work. 

See you next week!