The Museum has a new co-op student

My name is Britanny Benson and I am a co-op student at Strathroy District Collegiate Institute. I choose the museum because I have an interest in the preservation of artifacts. For the past three weeks, I have been working at the museum and completed various jobs. My first project was finding activities for the March Break programs, such as weaving paper fish, making a yarn sun, and using a paper bag to make an Easter basket. I also designed the promotional poster. I helped in the set-up of the current exhibit, “Quilts & Coverlets: Piecing Stories Together” and made the ID cards for the different quilt and loom related artifacts.

The week after March Break, I designed and put together the first of the “Hometown Heroes: Famous Canadians in Strathroy-Caradoc” displays on Stan Long. I choose items relating to Stan Long’s time as a member of the Strathroy Rockets hockey team. This project allowed me to be creative and gave me more experience with how a display is best set-up, even with only a few items. I have started designing next month’s display on Charlotte Rapley, as well. Although I’m unsure if this time will more or less difficult because there are more items that are associated with her, than there were for Stan Long.

Stan Long Display Case

I still look forward to completing the display because it is something I can learn from and be proud of once it is finished. Mostly, I look forward to working on cleaning the glass plate negatives that were found in Bosson’s Pharmacy in 2011. It will be interesting to see the pictures take shape a little bit at a time, like putting pieces of a puzzle together. I am having a lot of fun working at the museum and hope to learn as much I can.