By Lana Stone ’26

Since starting as an assistant in the Visual Resources Center this year, my work has taken on many forms. At the beginning of the semester, I was responsible for creating object cards for the artifacts in our large display cabinets in collections storage. This consisted of artifacts like the Byzantine icons, Japanese and Chinese ceramics, Ethiopian hand crosses and large sculptures. These cards were placed within the display cases alongside their respective artifacts, and included the title, accession number and credit line.

My second job this semester was to assign accession numbers to new artifacts, label them, and gather information that could be cataloged into our database, Digital Kenyon. This database is used to record information on our artifacts, and make them digitally available to members within and beyond the Kenyon community. The first items that I independently labeled, added to our master list, and uploaded into Digital Kenyon were a collection of tintype and paper portraits that had recently been purchased by the Art History Department. These portraits varied in quality, size and subject. My favorite of these was a tintype portrait of Sarah Hadley from the late 19th century, that required me to transcribe handwriting on the back of the portrait. The writing revealed that she was the first wife of Herman Hadley. Investigating the lives of the people behind our artifacts has always been something that interested me!

As I look forward to my career goals in museum work and archaeology, my work at the VRC has provided me with skills in object handling, cataloging and interpretation. I hope to use the skills I have learned here and apply them to larger museum and fieldwork contexts. Through the guidance of my peers and professors, I have learned basic but necessary skills in the treatment of artifacts and the organizational systems they require. I have always been passionate about the accessibility of historical and cultural materials, and I am excited to have contributed to the online accessibility of the Blick-Harris Study Collection.