This is a guest post written by Steve Penick, Archivist at the Stearns History Museum. Need a mini-grant to help purchase new materials or help fund a program? Apply now!

What were your favorite takeaways or new things learned?

Perhaps the most rewarding part of the CMLE grant hinges on our ability to serve future audiences, not only within the museum, but beyond to the broader world.  This vision includes access to our collections, preservation aspects, and potential projects as defined within our Strategic Plan.

Various mediums may include online exhibits, social media, and published works. In its most utilitarian form, purchasing these archival supplies enables SHM to better preserve and access the Myron Hall Photographic Collection by reducing direct staff handling of these images.  It also creates an improved storage environment and an opportunity to assign a specific retrieval number on each negative sleeve.

These exciting initiatives ultimately reach the community we serve. Our library and archival mission emphasizes preserving images, creating more avenues for access, and as a vehicle to interpret the past.

As a result of purchasing these materials, can you identify and explain a few things you can use/apply to your work or practice?

Purchasing these archival supplies follows SHM’s preservation strategy.  This first step, in an ongoing practice to improve our collection storage environment, will increase the likelihood that these images are available for our audience decades into the future.

The project also ushers in related preservation plans such as digitization. Any future projects of this nature reduce the likelihood that negatives will be mixed up during scanning and processing. 

Combining all of these benefits, CMLE’s grant encompasses more than just archival supplies and their preservation advantages. It allows our grant to reach the community on a direct level now and well into the future.