2017 Mapes Collection Interns Blog

Hola, Um waynuma?, Rimaykullayki, Gude, konnichiwa, Hello! We have successfully completed our 6th week! That's 3/4ths of the way through before we are all home-bound which will be a breath of fresh air (no pun intended...) for all of us. This week started out as a typical Monday with a little rocky morning due to subway complications but we didn't let it kill our work vibe! To date, we completed three more cabinets this week with a running total of 22 cabinets! Spirits were high this week with many jokes in between the adversities of curation with missing specimen labels, poorly archived boxes, and uneven ethafoam liners. Getting out of the windowless basement is also always an adventure. This week some of the interns ate lunch at a make-your-own-salad restaurant. Yum!  A specimen with an exemplary example of scientific terminology in the world of paleontologists. This week's scientific tour was of the Anthropology collection. Anthropology by definition is "...

Hello again! Week number five has come and gone and we’re well on our way to complete our goal of thirty cabinets of rehoused, cataloged and databased specimens. We’ve worked our way through all the recent nautilus collections and are back to working with (mostly) Carboniferous fossil cephalopod specimens. Cabinets housing fossil specimens, we’ve noted, are far more time consuming to curate than cabinets of nautilus shells so we still have much work ahead of us! ©AMNH/N. Berlet Working in the Mapes collection from 9 to 5 every weekday puts us interns in a bit of a bubble so the weekly collection tours we take are refreshing and crucial in getting a better perspective of the large-scale work done behind the scenes at the AMNH. This week we had the privilege to tour the museum’s ornithology collections with collections manager Paul Sweet. We met Paul at his office (which had a fantastic view of Central Park) where he proceeded to explain that the m...

But before we get to that, let’s see where we’re at, shall we? This was our state of mind on Monday: Me.me And this was our state of mind on Friday: Me.me Thank you, Bon Jovi, for summing it up quite nicely.  It was a  long  week, but totally worth it!  To keep us in our aforementioned zones, we rely heavily on music, anything from rock to Indie to ambient sounds to Disney, and everything in between.  The latter, actually, is what held most of our attention toward the end because it was easy to enjoy but also tune out because we’d all grown up with those songs.  In fact, many things about this week can be explained with song titles and lyrics… Okay, let’s get down to business.  Our weekly tour started with something odd, and that’s saying a lot coming from this group.  To get to our destination on the fourth floor, we had to take the only man-operated elevator, which was both really cool and slightly terrifying all at o...