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Ours is an all American story - typical of how communities grew up all across our great nation. While our story takes place in the back country of northwestern North Carolina at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it is likely to bear many similarities to the development of crossroads, towns, and cities throughout America.
As a result of a $5,000 grant received last year from Bay and Paul Foundation, the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History is embarking on a mission to better preserve and archive its extensive collections, which includes around 20,000 objects and 10,000 photographs.
The grant was intended for “collections management, digitization and archival supplies and equipment,” according to Matthew Edwards, executive director of the museum.
Museum volunteers gathered Tuesday afternoon for a training session to teach them how to repackage, document and digitize a large part of the museum’s collections.
Adrienne Berney, collections care trainer with the Connecting to Collections project, led the volunteers in a series of training activities, including an examination of multiple training objects in order to properly train them to archive materials and know the techniques needed to examine and document each object.
“Our goal is to help small museums and this grant helps us to go out in the state, to museums like this one, and host regional workshops to reform and revise the archives as well as learn object handling techniques. Some volunteers will work with objects and others will work primarily with the digitization of the archives,” Berney explained to the volunteers.
Read more: Mount Airy News - Behind the scenes at the museum
