Week 10

My experience at the museum on Saturday, started with the reorganization and printing of additional recognition papers for Vietnam veterans who visit our museum. The previous week that I was at the museum, I had to get cardstock paper for the recognition papers. I had to print over 70 copies of a letter from the United States Commander-in-Chief. The papers had to be reorganized with three other papers by paper clipping them together. After I was done making copies of the Vietnam recognition papers, I had to help one of the staff employees with their emails and then help escort a visitor to the museum’s supervisor. The visitor was a Colonel in the Marine Corps during the Gulf War, and he wanted to donate primary sources to our museum. He donated a New York Times article from September 11, 2001. This will be a great addition to our exhibit on 9/11. He also donated a shirt from his uniform, photos, a medal, and several other items. At this time, I also had to help another visiting guest. This guest works with the K-9 cemetery unit at the Homestead Air Force Base and wanted to find research related to her topic of interest. The museum has a library that is open to anyone that needs to complete research on any subject that is military related.

On Friday, the museum had a group of over 50 children that wanted to visit the museum. The museum split the children into several groups, and each group received a tour. The children and their parents were at the museum for over two hours. During part of the day, the supervisor of the museum needed me to automatically forward all the museum’s emails to his personal email account. Gmail was not sending the verification code to his phone and there were problems with merging his account to Gmail. I will have to work on this issue during my next day at the museum, because after several attempts, Google locked me out of the forwarding process. In addition to this, the battery on the museum’s military Jeep needed to be re-charged, we went to the Quonset Hut, and connected the battery charger to the Jeep. Afterwards, the battery for the clock in the museum needed to be replaced. I had to get a step ladder to reach the clock and change the battery.  After I changed the battery, the time on the museum’s clock also needed to be changed because of the recent time change.

One of my last assignments for the day included the reframing of a photo for our WW2 exhibit. We needed a frame because the old frame had broken. We would like to add to our WW2 exhibit some photos and medals from a man who lived in Miami, Florida, and who served in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Second World War.  One of his medals is a Purple Heart Medal. The museum wants to put on display his Purple Heart Medal that was donated to the museum.  Having a display of different medals is beneficial because many people do not know about the Purple Heart Medal. The museum’s focus is on representing the stories of people from Miami-Dade County who have served in the military.