To begin my summer museum work and to get some experience with handling artifacts, I’ve been working on a little bit of rehousing. This is where I take a box of artifacts from storage, unpack the artifacts to see how they’re doing, and then replace them in the box. While I repackage the items I’ve also been checking in our artifact database to make sure that they are registered correctly. It’s been interesting to trace the origins of an object, through looking in the database and at the donation form from when it originally came to the museum and its path through the museum accession process. This is the process through which an artifact enters the museum’s collection, is catalogued, and put in storage or on display. Some of the objects I’ve come across have either been missing accession numbers, have been given multiple numbers, or just have completely illegible numbers. In these cases, some extra work is required to figure out what exactly the object is and where it came from. 

One example of an object that was difficult to trace is this black plastic contraption:

The artifact was found in a box of military items, with a note from 2006 that stated that it was a “measuring instrument with lenses – not military”. This object isn’t something I use in my everyday life, and the accession number had been smudged, making the object difficult to identify. Guessing at what the number looked like it might be didn’t bring anything similar up in the database either. The smudged number was useful, however, in the year the object was donated was legible. In 2002, the Elphinstone Pioneer Museum merged with the Sunshine Coast Maritime Museum. The fact that the object was acquired in 2002 indicated that it was probably a maritime artifact.  We ended up scrolling through the database to try and find a description that could be applied to the object. Eventually we decided that it might be a sextant, and, sure enough, when we checked in the database, we found an entry featuring a picture that was most definitely the object. However, the object in the database had a number from 2011, suggesting that someone had given the sextant a new number when they couldn’t find the smudged number in the database. In the end, it was decided that the database entry should be changed to reflect the older, 2002 number. I also re-wrote the number before returning it to the box. 

A second mystery find was this metal number-less artifact pictured below:

 A note in the box indicated that the artifact was a patent log, a tool that had been used to measure the speed of a boat. However, putting the term “patent log” into the artifact database brought up nothing. The item was also listed on the outside of the box as depth sounder, a completely different maritime tool. Neither of these terms were helpful for finding the object in any records. Eventually, when looking through pictures of patent logs to try and find any other descriptive language that might help me locate the item in the database, I found an illustration from a thesaurus website depicting two pigeons having a little chat about synonyms for the term patent log. 

Seeing this, I put all the synonyms the graduated, bread-wearing pigeon mentioned into the database, and with that I found an entry for a “log line” (which turned out to be a very similar artifact). This led me to an entry for a “chip log”, which turned out to be the correct item. Now that it had been located in the database, I was able to number the patent log, so that it would be easy to locate in the future.

Unfortunately, even after all that looking, I wasn’t able to learn anything about the specific histories of these two objects, about where they had come from, or who had used them. The task of trying to figure it though was still interesting, and going through a few of the artifacts in storage has made me intrigued to see what other interesting, unidentifiable tools the museum’s collection contains. 

​- Lucy

​Hi! My name is Lucy Wolchock-Brown, and I’m so excited to be starting my job as the Summer Museum Assistant here at the Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives. It’s amazing to have the opportunity to see how the museum functions, and to learn more about Sunshine Coast history. I’m from Roberts Creek, and went to Elphinstone Secondary for high school. This past September I moved to Vancouver to attend the University of British Columbia. There I’ve been pursuing an arts degree, and am hoping to major in either anthropology or art history. I’ve always been a big museum visitor, and I'm delighted that I get to spend my whole summer at one!
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 I’m interested in material and visual culture, and am excited to explore those things through the museum’s collection. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can learn about the Sunshine Coast through working at the museum and having access to all the historical documents, artifacts, and photos here. This job will be a great way to learn about all the different facets of museum work, and I’m especially excited to learn about artifact handling and preservation. Over my summer at the museum I hope to be able to help maintain and run the museum, as well as learn more about the Sunshine Coast and its history.