3/01/2016

Learning the Digital Archive Software "PastPerfect"

One of the objectives of my internship at the Orangetown Historical Museum and Archives is mastering the digital archives software "PastPerfect."

This is a task to input information of the museum's historical objects which can be documents, artifacts, photography etc., and organize it in the computer system, so that each object can be called when they are needed.

Every single object the museum acquires has a unique number. With the number, we need to input, for example, date, material, size, description, name of the creator etc.

Yes, this is like numbers found on a spine of library books and information about these books loaded in book search system on computer.
Organizing the digital archive is one of the museum works as well.

With my electric dictionary on a side, I sometimes spend my day in front of a computer in order to practice archiving.  
Recently, I have worked on some files of printed objects which were used as information or illustration for a history book "Tappan 300 Years."

Trained by my excellent mentor at the internship, I went over the materials in the files, input the summary and description, and organized them in a collection.

As opposed to physical works such as hanging 30+ frames, digital archive requires more brain work... and an extensive vocabulary or nomenclature.

This is a challenging objective for me, but I have been learning one by one and making a progress!
It is exciting to think that my archiving will help other people call objects in the future and I also like organizing scattered information... so I can enjoy this brain work as well♪

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