Volunteering

I've started volunteering in the cultural heritage collection area of the QM on my free afternoon a week. I've only put in a couple of afternoons so far but it's good, and as of next month i'll be taking a very slight cut in hours on my regular job so I can spend a whole day in the collection area upstairs helping out. This is all to try and stop my brain getting rusty, and keep up a little experience-wise in that area; my lack of hands-on is what seems to have held me back in getting work this year.

So i'm helping out on what's a "long-term" project, so I can hopefully see it through til it's finished. The basic aim is to try and organise and consolidate some of the storage area in the Australian indigenous section, so they can free up space that'll allow for acquisitions in the future (which have pretty much stagnated at the moment). One of the people who was involved in the move of the collections into the new Melbourne Museum is now our senior collection management person, and has helped with the organisation a little - and a lot of the ideas are very similar to what's in place in the Melbourne Museum (custom size boxes etc). So far i've spent a lot of time installing runners in the compactus units, which shallow metal drawers are being put into, and moving items from temporary storage in cardboard boxes into these drawers. Yesterday I was looking over some of the items (i'm working on the twine/rope/cord collection) with the senior curator, and we noticed there were a few things missing or in the wrong order. So i'm doing a small inventory to label the drawers properly, and to make sure there's space for the missing objects once they're (hopefully) located.

I'm happy to be back pottering around with collections again. The sort of stuff i'm doing reminds me of when I was first volunteering out at the UQ Anthro Museum. But it's good experience for now, even if it won't lead to paid work. I need as much recent experience int his sort of thing as I can so my resume doesn't look as sad and tired as it does currently, in the hopes it won't take me too long to find a reasonable museum job when I head to the UK.