Museum Collections: A Panel Discussion

Join us for a roundtable discussion focused on the unique challenges facing those working in vital behind-the-scenes roles at museums and historic sites. On Saturday, August 19 at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, three collections professionals will discuss their work and the importance of collections management in our fast-paced world.

Meet the Collections experts:

Kate McDaniel currently serves as the collections manager at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. She holds a Master’s of Library and Information Science from Wayne State University with a concentration in Digital Asset Management and recently completed an internship with the Library of Congress in that field. At the museum, she focuses on the flow of information within the museum ecosystem and has written and presented on the topics of information and collections management. She has performed metadata cleanup and archival description for local libraries and believes strongly in the mission of public libraries and free access to information. Her personal research interests include the role of women in vernacular culture, particularly in the Deep South.

Hank Griffith is the Chief Preparator at the National Building Museum where he has worked for 20 years. In addition to work as chief preparator, Griffith also provides assistance to the museum’s two registrars/collections managers. When he first started with the institution, there were only about 100,000 items in the collection, most of which were works on paper and photographs. That has grown to more than 250,000 items all of which are stored on-site. The wide variety of materials and the challenges they present in both properly handling, storing, or installing them in exhibitions makes this job interesting.

Jay T. Harrison is a cultural historian of the early modern Americas with research interests in indigenous history and the history of colonial settlement in Mexico, the American Southwest, and the greater Atlantic world including Africa. He is a member of the history faculty at Hood College where he serves as coordinator for the public history program and teaches the collections courses in the that program. Over his years of research, he worked in national archives and museum holdings in Mexico, the United States, and Spain, utilizing colonial-era archives and ephemera collections. He has worked on collaborative programs with the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution, member institutions in the Consortium of Southwest Centers, History Colorado, the historical society of the state of Colorado, and several Native American tribes on projects spanning modern American history and the indigenous histories of the greater Americas. As a museum and archive director in Colorado at the Center of Southwest Studies, he supervised collections management for both physical and digital collections and worked with the staff there to advise a number of other institutions on collections issues related to artifact conservation and preservation.

This will be a pay-what-you-please program at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.