Baseball Display

The baseball display and is up! This past Tuesday, I spent most of my time at the Archives creating the display, with some much appreciated assistance from Sarah Leckie. The display is split into two sections. The left side chronicles just a few of the many different teams that have been on PC's campus since the early 1900s, while the right side highlights famous players and influential coaches. There are even a few baseball cards and copies of the Diamond Club Newsletter, the newsletter for the bluehose baseball team. We even have the original drawing for the new baseball complex on display. So, if you're interested, please come up to the second floor of the library, and visit the area outside of the archives to see the baseball exhibit.

In making the exhibit, I had to polish several skills that I don't normally use every day. One, is spatial awareness. If you know me, you know that I cannot operate without running into walls, tables, and chairs everywhere I go. So for someone who doesn't have a very good idea of space, spacing things out was a bit difficult for me, especially before I figured out how the display should be set up. The number of photo frames I had to work with seemed overwhelming. I had to somehow figure out how to display so many different things - pictures of teams, pictures of individuals, baseball cards, gloves, media guides, and even an actual baseball. So after panicking a bit, I did what I do best, and channeled my OCD. After sorting the picture frames into team photos, individual photos, and caption excerpts, I realized that the most logical system of display was to show the progression of PC baseball in one area by showing the teams through the years. I used the other shelf to highlight particular players and coaches. By employing my organization skills, I was able to overcome my spatial difficulty. 

After solving the issue of how to display the items, everything went very smoothly, and I must say that I'm quite proud of what I've done. Having gotten all the pictures up, however, I had to solve the quandary of what to do with all the extra things, such as the gloves, balls, cards. I decided to use them as accent pieces and started decorating. Now, I've never thought of myself as a decorator. Aiming to make sure everything was visible and that one side of the exhibit was not more crowded than another, I tried my best. To my surprise, my best was fantastic. The exhibit looked amazing, and even Sarah and Mrs. Griffith said so. They even said I could make my own display if I wanted to, though I have no idea what I would focus on for it. Tackling another project sounds exciting though. 

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.