Sunday, November 11, 2012

First work day: success!

Jerry, Jeana, Everett, Angie, Ann and I worked for a good part of Saturday organizing the historical society's collections inside the Ahavas Sholom temple. We started out with a short overview, from the American Association (Alliance) of Museums, on the importance of organizing, cataloging, and registering the collections for future generations. Basically, without information about the objects and knowing what their significance is, many objects have minimal historical value.

With this first pass at organizing, we sorted the objects into the following categories: Jewish community, Ligonier people, City of Ligonier, businesses in Ligonier, Ligonier area schools, non-Ligonier history, and "unknown". Our biggest obstacle was staying on-task! It was very tempting to sit and read the very ledgers, letters, and books we were supposed to be sorting!

Regardless of this temptation, we got a LOT done. I think we should be able to organize all the collections during our next work day (December 15) and begin registering the objects with unique numbers! Many thanks to all the volunteers!