Feel free to contact me by phone, postal mail (at the number/address above) or email at (museumcataloging at yahoo dot com) for more information. Thank you for your interest!
For a summary of my museum-related
skills
and experience, click
here.
To see a drawing I did of an
artifact (an Ethiopian silver cross in the National Museum of African
Art), click
here. Other drawings of mine on this site include this Shang
Dynasty ritual
blade from the Sackler Gallery in Washington and this White Buffalo
kachina
doll that belongs to my parents.
Juarez Tour Guide / Ciudad Juarez Archeological Museum
I wrote descriptions of exhibits at the archeological museum in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, for the Juarez Tour Guide web site, a site that was founded to promote the city and encourage visitors. These were used in a virtual tour of the museum. The virtual tour includes pictures taken by my wife, Jill. This tour is an ongoing collaboration with the site owner and the museum staff.
National Collage SocietyI designed a virtual museum of collage for the National Collage Society's web page. For this project, I collected links to reproductions of collages on the web, allowing users to access a wide variety of collage images from a single site. I recently finished an upgrade to the page. I am currently doing some research into grant opportunities for the Society.
National Park Service--Harper's Ferry Center
In 1999, I cataloged and marked a collection of 440 objects purchased by the Harper's Ferry Center's Historic Furnishings Division for the 2001 re-opening of the Thomas Edison National Historic Site, using Rediscovery. These items are period pieces that will be used to flesh out the site's existing pattern shop and kitchen exhibits. The collection included a vast number of woodworking and measuring tools consistent with late Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-century examples, as well as various kitchen and maintenance tools. My knowledge of Rediscovery helped me duplicate information in like records and ensure consistency of descriptions. Click to see examples of descriptions I wrote for a turn-of-the-century water cooler, a router plane, and a decimal chart. (Click the back button of your browser when you are done reading.)
In 2000, I completed another project
for
the Historic Furnishings Division, this time involving about 400
artifacts
from Harper's Ferry National
Historic
Park. I have posted descriptions of an alcohol
lamp and a reproduction
spice tin from this project (these descriptions come with pictures
of the items for comparison).
Recently (in the winter of 2005), I
completed another cataloging project for the Center that included
artifacts for the Selma to
Montgomery National Historic Trail. I did research on Kodak
"Baby Brownie" cameras for this project. My
father-in-law, Bob Hendricks, used to work in the photographic chemical
field, and he helped greatly with the research on the camera.
National Park Service--Ford's Theater National Historic Site
I cataloged a small collection (30 objects) at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC in mid-2002. Among them was this anti-Lincoln pamphlet from the 1920's.
National Park Service--Rock Creek Park
I recently finished several years of
work on the museum
collection
of Rock Creek Park, including artifacts from the Old Stone House
in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, the Peirce
Mill site, and some historical objects and natural history
specimen records from the general Rock
Creek Park collection. This
print of the Old Stone House (by a Washington artist named Caroline
Bean) is
part of that collection. For this project, I have generated new
catalog records and marks, revised existing ones, written scope of
collection statements, and done general collection research. For the
natural history records, I did
some basic research on petrified
wood.
I determine fees based on the amount of
research and time needed for the job and the amount of travel required
(I am willing to travel extensively, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic
region, although I can only travel outside the Baltimore-Washington
Metro Area for brief times due to family
concerns).
The larger a collection is, the more time will be needed to catalog
it properly.
I generally charge a per-artifact fee, which I am willing to reduce for
especially large collections. I am also willing to work with a
limited
budget and come up with a fee that is acceptable both to myself and to
you, the client. I use the National Park Service's fees for
artifact
cataloging (as published by the Curatorial
Services Division) as a guideline.
Inquiries on any of these services are welcome (at the address and phone number above, or at museumcataloging at yahoo dot com). I have liability insurance through the Hartford.
For more information about museums and
cataloging, I recommend the links below.
LINKS TO MUSEUM-RELATED ORGANIZATIONS AND PAGES
American Association of Museums
Campbell Center for Historic Preservation Studies (in Illinois)
The
Foundation
Center
(An important resource for all
non-profits,
not just museums.)
National
Park Service Cultural Resources Page
(This page includes short descriptions
of most of the NPS museum collections.)
National Trust for Historic Preservation
Smithsonian
Institution
(This page has links to all of the
Smithsonian's
individual museums.)
Also, here are links to a few
individual
museums, historical sites, and similar places that I like (this list
will
change constantly--feel free to check back):
International
Intellectual Museum (game, toy, and culture museum in Ulan Bator,
Mongolia)
Jell-O
Museum and Gallery (LeRoy, New York)
National
Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC)
If you are interested in seeing more
catalog
descriptions, I would recommend this
page, which is a Rediscovery for Internet application done by
Springfield
Armory National Historic Site in Springfield, Massachusetts. It
is
very well done, and includes many catalog descriptions, along
with
pictures. Click
here to see my review of Chenhall's Revised Nomenclature on
Amazon.com. Click
here to see another catalog description, this one written for the
National
Park Service's Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection (where I worked for
eight years). Here is
an article I wrote about remoras for the National Aquarium in
Washington, DC, that is similar in some ways to a catalog record.
Click here
to return to the top of this page.
Click
here
if you are interested in learning about other writings of mine.
This page was
last revised on September 7,
2007.