Volume 5, No. 2

South Florida Collections Management Center

Re:Collections

Summer 2015

What’s New

Curator Nancy Russell and SFCMC partner Conservator Ron Harvey presented a poster session at the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) annual meeting, held May 14-16, 2015 in Miami, FL. The poster presented our cannon conservation work at DRTO, including historical research, treatment methods, and successful use of micro-climates for bore preservation.

Out and About

Registrar Jennifer Stafford attended the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections’ (SPNHC) annual meeting held May 18-22 in Gainesville, FL. Jennifer was able to catch up with our partners at the Florida Museum of Natural History and NPS Sr. Curator for Natural History, Greg MacDonald, as well as making new professional connections

SFCMC Staff Spotlight

Meet the museum’s summer interns! Alexis Schuman, Kelly Delancy & Katie Matthew started at the SFCMC in May. They are students in the University of Florida’s Museum Studies Master’s program. Katie and Alexis are focusing their studies on collection management, while Kelly is finishing her Master’s degree in anthropology. Previously, Katie has worked with the National Park Service at Grant-Kohrs Ranch NHS and Hagerman Fossil Beds NM. Alexis has worked at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History as an educator and museum intern. Katie and Alexis will be with the SFCMC for 10 weeks. Kelly’s internship lasts five weeks, after which she will be collecting oral histories on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera for her thesis. They enjoy sightseeing, crafting, kayaking, and snorkeling while in south Florida. They are working on cataloging cultural objects and natural science specimens as well as gaining practical experience with

environmental monitoring, pest management, and other preventive conservation work.They are pictured with one of their favorite specimens–“Bob” the crocodile (EVER 58854)

Fun Facts: Did You Know . . .

Everglades National Park and the Cincinnati Zoo have both cool art and cool animals in common! Cincinnati Modern wildlife artist Charlie Harper was commissioned to create original paintings of the Everglades; his work is also notable at the Cincinnati Zoo. Harper’s Everglades paintings will soon return from cleaning conducted by conservator James Swope.

Specimen highlight

Project records and voucher specimens from a permitted study titled Coral connectivity between deep and shallow sites in the Florida Reef Tract: Identifying deep water refugia and assessing their importance as source of coral replenishment following bleaching by principal investigator Xaymara Serrano are a recent addition to the BISC museum collection. Four important scleractinian reef coral species with diverse life histories and reproductive strategies (Montastraea faveolata, M. cavernosa, Porites astreoides & Agaricia agaricites) were studied to estimate gene flow and symbiont (zooxanthellae) diversity between different reefs and depths in the Florida reef tract.

DESO Planning Efforts

SFCMC staff has been engaged in several planning efforts at DESO so far this year. During the fall, SFCMC staff provided input on development of the park’s Foundation Document. As reported in the last newsletter, an integrated pest management (IPM) plan is in progress. SFCMC Curator Nancy Russell also participated in the State of the Park (SotP) workshop at DESO, May 6-7, 2015. SotP reports are a strategic management, communication, and education tool describing the state of the park (including its museum collections) and tracking change over time. This workshop also provided the opportunity for Mary Troy, SER chief of museum and archives services, to visit DESO and meet park staff.

Archives in Action

Archives NCPE interns Mark Walters and Alison Skaggs completed their internships at the SFCMC in May 2015 and have moved on to exciting new opportunities. During the course of their internship, they worked on several projects, including cataloging records from the Everglades National Park Reference Library (EVER 42242, Series II). This body of records is primarily comprised of books, journal articles, newspaper and magazine clippings, reports, theses, dissertations, bibliographies, memoranda, newsletters, and brochures (such as visitor guides and site bulletins). The subjects cover the geographic areas primarily in the Everglades, Dry Tortugas, Big Cypress, and Biscayne. They also cataloged records from the Everglades National Park Bibliographic Project (EVER 42242, Series II), which documents a 1977 effort by the Department of the Interior to develop a bibliographic model which could be used by government agencies; the Everglades bibliography served as the prototype.

Mark and Alison assisted with several other projects including preparing the Biscayne Records of the Superintendent’s Office for upcoming microfilming and digitization, conducting surveys on several collections among other tasks. We would like to thank them again for all of their hard work.

BICY Museum Workday

SFCMC staff (Alexis, Katie, Kelly & Jennifer) spent June 5th at Big Cypress NP completing assorted collections management tasks, including housekeeping in the museum work room at Oasis VC, placing Tyvek hurricane covers on recently acquired artwork, cataloging and photographing collection objects & rotating basketry items in the exhibit case at Oasis VC. At the Welcome Center, the Seminole canoe was cleaned. A big part of the day was spent doing the annual cleaning of the swamp buggy display, adjacent to the Welcome Center. In addition to standard museum cleaning tools – hake brushes, dusting cloths, a Nilfisk vacuum with HEPA filter – bug jackets for the swamp buggy cleaning were a must. Summer is here and the mosquitos were out in force!