Behind the Scenes - Collections Assistant Brenna Campbell

Sep 22

Working at the museum this summer as a Collections Assistant has been a wonderful experience. I have learned so much and experienced many aspects of working in museum collections.

-Brenna

The Rossland Museum & Discovery Centre would like to thank the Government of Canada and the Canadian Museums Association's Young Canada Works program for contributing to this paid student opportunity.

New Donations

One of the projects I have been working on is the cataloguing of new donations. This involves taking measurements, writing the description and contextual information on the object’s history, taking photos, checking their condition and ensuring the objects are stored properly. When all that is completed, adding that information into the museum’s database, PastPerfect. Over the course of my time at the museum, I have helped catalogue 85 new objects.

We didn’t have any information on this tumbler when it was donated, so I was tasked with additional research to figure out where it came from and a little bit of history of the Rossland Mountain Biking Society.

Geology Collection

This large fluorite specimen from the Rock Candy Mine is probably my favourite of the geological specimens I catalogued!

The geology collection is another project I have been working on. Organizing the geology collection has been an ongoing project at the museum for a couple of years. The museum has a large collection of rocks and minerals that need to be identified, catalogued and stored. In my time here, I have fully catalogued about 120 rocks and minerals in the collection, and worked with the Friends of the Roger Terhune Geology Club to identify another 60 that were already in the collection. This process involved many of the same steps as with the new donations, as well as research to include information about the properties of the rocks and minerals.

Hunter Brothers

In the last couple of months, I have also been involved in cataloguing the objects in the Hunter Brothers exhibit. While some of the objects have been catalogued, there was still a large portion that weren’t. Professionally cataloguing objects that already exist in the museum’s permanent object collection has been an important ongoing project for a few years. There are still a lot of objects in the collection that have not been fully catalogued, so this will continue to be an ongoing project.

One of my favourite artifacts that I catalogued in the Hunter Brothers is our beautiful Anchor embroidery thread colour swatch card!

Data Standardization

Another of the projects that I was assigned was to go through and standardize the records in our collections database (PastPerfect). Over the years, quite a few different people have worked in the museum’s collections department and contributed to cataloguing objects. This can result in slight differences in how things were described and how the information was entered into the database. The museum’s practices have developed during this time as well. Standardizing terminology allows for more streamlined searches, either internally by museum staff or by the public through our Community Collections Portal.

Explore the Community Portal

Skill Development

During the course of my time here, I have also participated in a couple of skill-building workshops. These included making custom boxes, making book repairs, repairing broken ceramics and changing out the textiles on the display mannequins.