Samantha Froemming's History Blog

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This was the last official week of the spring internships, which was very bittersweet! I have enjoyed working on this project so much, and I have learned more than I could have ever imagined before starting this internship. Since my last update, the team turned in our final deadline materials! This included our revised narrative text, object label draft designs, and narrative text design drafts. Our revisions on the narrative text may not end up being the finalized version that will accompany the displays in the gallery space, but we worked to revise the text as much as we could before the end of the internship period for the spring semester. There are opportunities for students (including our semester's team) to volunteer over the summer to continue to work setting up the gallery space for the exhibit's opening, so I am assuming that is how the rest of the materials will be ...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week has been a whirlwind! There has been a lot of moving parts to this week's progress on the Bicentennial Exhibit, and the semester's end is quickly approaching at the same time! Since my last update, the team, graduate supervisor, and project supervisor have worked out that our idea for the Archive session to create the object labels will not be necessary. This is because the object labels can be much simpler than what we originally thought, which is great for our time limit for the rest of the internship! I had a meeting with the graduate supervisor, and we figured out an easier way to create the labels since we will not have the objects directly in front of us when we make them. For now, we will simply use the title of the objects from the object list we made earlier in the semester, and we will not need to include descriptions. On top of this, we also came to the con...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week has been focused on editing the narrative text and beginning our design of the Canva object label templates in preparation for our session in the Archive and Dr. Crepeau's office collection. Communication about the schedule for the workshop session has been delayed, but hopefully we will receive confirmation for next Wednesday (4/15) so that the team can get the labels drafted before our deadline.  Because of delays in communication, we have decided to extend the deadline for the object labels to April 24, which allows us more time to make sure the labels are completed and in good shape for the end of the project before it is set up in the gallery space. I have been in communication with the other undergraduate interns about this, and in the meantime we will be drafting the template for the object labels in Canva. The deadline for next week will be the template instead of...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: Since turning in our narrative text draft last week, the team has been waiting for our first round of feedback for future editing on the gallery narratives. In the meantime, we are working to find a day and time to get the whole team together to draft the object labels, which are due on April 17.  We have hit a bit of a roadblock in trying to figure out a day to plan this drafting session, because of everyone's normal schedules and also how hectic the end of the semester gets for everyone involved. I have been in constant communication with the graduate project supervisor to try to figure out a day, however we have not made much progress in this regard. My initial idea was for the team to be able to go back into the Special Collections and University Archives and pull out the specific objects that we decided on back in February with our object list, and to plug them into a Canva te...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week is the same as the past two weeks (including spring break): working on our narrative text for the gallery cases! The other two undergraduate interns and I have been researching and writing our selected narrative themes/sections, and everything is looking great! We each chose five themes/narratives to work on, and I chose the three main introductory panels for the exhibit's overall purpose and background, and the first two themed panels for the Bicentennial in Florida in 1976. I have had a lot of fun going the research for these sections, especially the panel for Disney World's "America on Parade" that went on from 1975-1976 in honor of the 200th anniversary of the United States' adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The parade featured distinct "American" characters, such as pilgrims and suffragettes, to showcase the "people who bui...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: We have been working on our digital component proposal and timeline since last week. The proposal and timeline were due on Friday (3/13) at 12pm, but we turned it in the day before! Our proposal introduced our method for the digital component which we chose to be a Canva twin of the physical exhibit. In our proposal, we explained why Canva was the best option for our digital exhibit (i.e. the department already has an account, it is simple to navigate, better accessibility etc.) and we also included a mock-up of what the Canva exhibit would look like and a proposed timeline for the creation process.  At first, our proposal for the digital component was going to be a Prezi digital exhibit. We originally chose this because it offered a more interactive feature to the digital component since Prezi allows the viewer to move around freely in the presentation without it needing to be lin...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week saw our first major deadline in the project: the gallery space floor plan! Since last week, we have been working to finalize our object list and create our floor plan for the physical space that the exhibit will be displayed in. After finalizing the object list, I created the floor plan in Procreate (on my iPad), which was modeled after the current 4th Floor Gallery space in the UCF library. During our team's tour of the gallery space a few weeks ago, we decided that the current floor plan in that space would nicely fit our exhibit and there would be no need to alter it from what it already is. The current gallery space has a great flow throughout the cases' positions, and it allows space for any accessibility needs like wheelchairs, crutches, canes, etc. The floor plan I created also included a key that detailed each label on the exhibit floor plan cases. To accompan...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: First, I wish to discuss my experience in the role of "team lead" for the undergraduate interns, and my process of learning how to be in this role:  I am so grateful to have been given an opportunity to be a team lead for the interns, but it has not come without a learning curve! Before this internship, I had never really been put in a position (officially, at least) where I am "in charge" of other people. Usually in my academic life, I tend to take on this type of role naturally in group settings because of my passion for learning and my want to do things the best I can. This means that in group projects, I tend to take on a "project manager" type of role, which has always been great for me. This internship has allowed me to really learn and experience this in a new way, which has been amazing.  The times I struggle in this internship, and specifically in...

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week had some great experiences/developments! First, I will discuss the field trip that the Public History Central team went on: On Wednesday, we had our field trip to visit the Orange County Regional History Center! When we first arrived, we were introduced to two employees within two different departments at the History Center, which included someone who worked in collections, and someone who worked in public programming. They each spoke about their paths to finding their positions at the History Center, and they gave us valuable insight into this field of work. The positions are very different from each other, but they overlap in some ways. Working in collections includes, of course, working to house and acquire items for the collection, which includes physical artifacts and materials, but also other not-so-physical things like conducting oral histories for the collection...

Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week saw great progress for the project's development! On Wednesday, we (the team) were able to go into the University Archives and Special Collections to view Dr. Crepeau's items housed at the Library. This collection includes different items from the collection housed in his office in Trevor Colbourn Hall, and we will be using both collections to build our exhibit. In the archived collection, there are many items related specifically to Florida and the Bicentennial, such as Disney socks, a telephone directory book, posters, advertisement booklets, etc. I believe that these items will tie in perfectly with our theme of the Bicentennial on the local level in 1976. We will look at the overarching themes of national Bicentennial as it is unavoidable with the overall narrative, but we will focus on Florida specifically because that is where UCF is and where the collection was...

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 ...

    Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: Since my last blog post, there has been little progress on the development of the Exhibit, however I know that we will be able to start working on the project soon since there should be a meeting between the graduate project supervisor and the stakeholders. Until then, we do not have any specific details to be able to begin the major work, so we are focusing on learning the context and background of this type of project and the kind of work that goes into something like this. To guide us through this, we have been assigned readings that inform how exhibits are created, what goes into the building of an exhibit, and what this kind of work entails in general. There are a few readings that we are assigned to get through, and it has been enjoyable to learn about this type of work, especially since it is something I hope to learn more and more about as this project progresses....

  Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development project: This week has been focusing on getting everyone comfortable and familiar with the project and what is to come over the semester. On Wednesday, we met with everyone in Public History Central to discuss our trainings that we were assigned after the first meeting last week. These trainings involved metadata work, transcription, History Harvests, oral histories, and other related topics. Although not all of these trainings applied to what our team on the Bicentennial project will engage with, it was a great opportunity for us to learn new skills that we can apply generally as training historians! I really enjoyed the transcription trainings, since I have worked on a project that involved transcriptions before this internship through the Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center. Getting to reflect on that project in my training for Public History Central was nice to see ho...

 Hello!  My name is Samantha Froemming, and I am an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. For some who may have seen my previous semester's blog posts: I am starting as an intern in a new opportunity this semester with the Bicentennial Exhibit Development Project in connection with Public History Central and the UCF Library Special Collections! For those who may be seeing this for the first time: welcome! This is where I share my progress in my internships at UCF, with weekly updates as required by the course advisor. This project is different from the other internship I engage with, and I am so excited to learn everything that allows me to be a part of this project! I am interested in pursuing museum studies within the realm of Public History, so this project is a great place to start as an undergraduate student. I look forward to all the new skills and experiences I gain throughout this semester, and I cannot wait to share my progress here!  This p...