Week 2

Last week provided optimum learning experiences in the area of technology. Technology is a fickle friend. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't do exactly what you want to do. This week, I learned that I had to roll with my fickle friend and think quickly on my feet to solve problems. Most of these technological issues were related to the upcoming baseball exhibit that the archives is preparing for. Recently I've been taking pictures down to the photocopier with Mrs. Leckie and toying with the magic of computers to get them into a presentable fashion to put in the display. Sometimes this means printing the images from a powerpoint and at other times, it gets a little more complicated. Operating the printers requires cooperation from several different groups. First, Sarah and I have to be able to communicate what we want to Doug Wallace, the media guru downstairs in the media center. This requires good communication skills, which I thankfully picked up quickly on. This is important because if we can't explain to Doug what our vision is and what we want, we simply will not get what we want. So in order to put together an awesome baseball exhibit, we had to communicate with him, an outsider to the project, in an effective fashion that would yield the desired results.

Other than communication I learned other valuable skills such as the ability to problem solve. When trying to print out our powerpoint of pictures, we were alone in the media center without a guru to help. Unfortunately, the images printed on the wrong paper, loaded from the wrong tray, and they were the incorrect size. We had to go into powerpoint and reformat the pictures. I did not know how to do this, but I decided to give it a try and see if I could help. It turned out, that once I looked around the computer a bit, I figured out how to not only reformat the image, but to tell the printer to work, and also let it know which tray it had to pick the paper up from. The result was that we got our photos printed correctly on the right type of paper. I was proud of myself for accomplishing this and I felt like I was making a difference to the baseball project.

I also learned how to look for alternative solutions. We had been attempting to copy two very large posters of baseball players, but the problem was that they were just too big to fit into the copier. The result was that we got a choppy image that was held together by tape. I suggested that we take pictures of the posters and then load those onto a computer where we could reformat them to whatever size we wanted. Sarah said that was a great idea, and so we got Doug to take pictures and we reformatted the images. They're now framed and ready to go on display.

This week I have discovered more than valuable career skills. I've discovered something about myself: I like to organize things. I've known this for a while, but I'd like to do it for a career. Helping to set up the baseball display has helped me to realize this. I like to make sure that items are presented cleanly and in a stately manner, and I put a lot of care into making sure the items I've framed for the baseball exhibit have turned out this way. Thinking on a larger scale, I've come to the conclusion that I would love to set up museum exhibits. Staging and creating exhibits sounds like a blast to me. I cannot wait till the baseball display goes up, because then I'll (hopefully) get to make another exhibit.