Welcome Katie MacKenzie – 2018 Summer Intern

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MUSEUM INTERNSHIP 2018

Valdez, Alaska May 24, 2018 – The Valdez Museum is proud to welcome its summer collections care intern, Katie MacKenzie, who will perform cataloguing and collection management for objects in the museum’s collection. In 2007, the Valdez Museum completed Revitalization, a project including the installation of a climate-controlled storage facility for its collections. A new storage facility necessitated the updating of artifact home locations; museum staff quickly took this project as an opportunity to improve its standards of collection management by completing incomplete records, standardizing procedures, and improving artifact housing and retrieval methods. In 2008, the museum begun employing a summer intern to start the process of recataloguing its collection item by item. Now entering its eighth nonconsecutive year, the Valdez Museum seeks to continue its program of comprehensive collection management. In 2014, the Valdez Museum begun the process of planning for a new or upgraded facility, placing an imperative upon the museum to complete cataloguing its collection before a move takes place.

Ms. MacKenzie is a second-year Museum Studies graduate student at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Her previous museum experience includes graduate-level collections assistance at the Mayborn Museum, of Waco, Texas; an archives internship at the Armstrong Browning Library, where she helped transcribe and prepare Victorian letters to be digitized into an online exhibit; and as a collections intern, and later assistant, at the Bosque Museum, a small historic museum in rural Clifton, Texas. Her experience with digitization, material culture, and the PastPerfect cataloguing software used by the Valdez Museum, will prove to be valuable assets towards the continuation of the museum’s long-term project.

Past internships have been funded by the Alaska State Museum’s externship program, which was discontinued last year. Funding for the project has continued, through grants from the Collection Management Fund, provided by the Rasmuson Foundation and administered by Museums Alaska, Alaska’s statewide museums association.

Contact: Patricia Relay – Tel: 907 835 2764 Email: director@valdezmuseum.org

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