It was an exciting week at the Museum, well for me anyway. This week we had a total of 17 volunteers come out over three days to help bag, tag, and box artifacts from our collections. We made good progress towards sorting through the over 100 boxes in the Childers Collection and finished 44 boxes!
The research and collection of Morlin Childers, one of our Museum founders, is currently drawing a lot of interest from professional researchers, students, and volunteers on a local and national level. Childers worked on archaeological sites throughout the Valley from the 1950s to the 1980s. His collection returned to the museum in 2015 from BLM, and we have been working on cataloguing the documents and artifacts ever since.
There are thousands of objects in the collection, and there’s no perceivable organization to it. That's where I come in, with the help of volunteers, to bring order to the chaos. Our volunteers get a chance to go behind the scenes and get hands on experience curating our collection.
Last Saturday was our busiest day. Ten teenage volunteers from the Imperial County Department of Probations Community Work Service Program came out to help us sort artifacts. They got really into sorting, bagging, and tagging the artifacts. At the end of the day, a few asked if they could come back out to volunteer again and some asked if the museum was hiring. Their enthusiasm and interest in the collection really made my day!
The work we completed is extremely important to the museum’s collections and ended up being a lot of fun. We still have a lot to do, and are going to need more volunteers.
Are you interested in volunteering? Keep an eye out for our upcoming Volunteer Days. You can get in contact with us via our email ivdmuseum@gmail.com or give us a call at (760)358-7016.
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