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Museum Program Internship
Yosemite National Park
Yosemite National Park was first set aside as a reserve in 1864, the oldest unit established in the National Park Service. In 1890 it was designated as a National Park. Yosemite was a leader in establishing a prototype National Park Service museum program in the early twentieth century, and has developed museum collections in response to a variety of needs and opportunities. The resulting museum collection is one of the finest in the National Park Service, in its size, value, depth and complexity. Its holdings include over 2.4 million natural and cultural items. Photographs of the Yosemite area constitute a large and important park of the park's collection of historic material. They provide an invaluable documentary record of the landscapes, populations, historic structures, and activities of the park. The museum collection of over 50,000 photographs, albums, photographically-illustrated books, stereographs, negatives, and lantern slides ranges from some of the earliest photographs taken of the park to the work of contemporary visitors and artists. The collection also contains unique and important manuscript materials related to Yosemite's history, including personal papers of James Mason Hutchings and Galen Clark, park administrative records, early concessionaire records, and numerous hotel registers. The Yosemite Park and Curry Co. donated their own archives of records, photographs, and other documentary material to the park's collection. The records of National Park Service administration of the park are also an important part of the archives. Additional paper materials include historic brochures and maps, chromolithographs and engravings, and other publications related to the history of the park. The archives contain 1,800 cubic feet of material from the 1870’s to the present. In addition, the park slide archive contains over 100,000 images. The ethnographic collection numbers approximately 5,000 objects, and is the largest in the National Park Service. The collection contains the largest extant group of documented Miwok and Paiute materials from the region, and is the only such collection to contain materials dating from the 1880s to the present day. Yosemite's archeological collection is also of considerable significance, and includes assemblages central to establishing a regional chronological sequence, as well as some of the earliest materials found in the Sierra Nevada region. A large herbarium of approximately 5,000 specimens is maintained by the museum, as are vertebrate study skins, skeletal material, and specimens preserved in alcohol by NPS naturalists during the early years of NPS administration of Yosemite. Material from the Yosemite Museum collection is exhibited in the Indian Cultural Exhibit and Museum Gallery in Yosemite Valley, as well as at the Pioneer Yosemite History Center in Wawona and at the Transportation Exhibit in El Portal. During each of the past two summers, a museum intern has worked with the park’s museum and library collection program in Yosemite Valley. These internships were an introduction to the museum field and to the National Park Service. The interns were mentored by the park curator and curatorial staff, and served as integral members of the staff for the summer. The primary duties outlined for the interns included cataloging a variety of museum collections from the museum’s cultural and natural resource holdings, conducting research and data entry, responding to information requests, performing a wide variety of collections management functions, assisting with exhibit maintenance and preparation, and performing preventive conservation. Projects within the museum vary widely and depend largely on current and planned exhibits, and on the individual interests of each intern. During summer 2007, the museum intern, who expressed a strong interest in Biology, devoted much of her time to the natural history collections of the Yosemite Museum. She assisted with the re-cataloging of an accession of updated lichens, as well as the original cataloging of a new invasive plant specimen study. She labeled and housed the accessions, researched the plants on databases and in reference books, and imported data collected to the park’s Automated National Cataloging System (ANCS). She also assisted with the Museum’s annual inventory of random objects, accessions and controlled property, and completed a physical inventory of several collection cabinets. In addition to these projects, the intern made occasional visits to the Yosemite archives in El Portal, and participated in field trips to affiliated museums in Groveland, CA and in Oakland, CA. Finally, given the intern’s strong interest in biology, she was assigned to go bear roving with the Interpretive Biologist rangers one evening. Specific projects undertaken by the summer 2006 intern included re-housing accession documents; cataloging and organizing videos and maps in the research library; organizing historic hotel ledgers, guest books and receipt records in the collection room; and facilitating a visit from a team in Washington which came to photograph hand-woven Native American baskets, priceless oil paintings and other items of interest from the collection. The intern also worked with a number of animal specimens from the collection room, including both wet specimens, such as snakes, lizards and fish, and dry specimens, such as stuffed birds. At the end of the summer, the intern spent several days at Half Dome assisting the Wilderness Office on a project monitoring visitor use on the steel cables at Half Dome’s northwest face. This project was assigned due to the intern’s avid interest in hiking, and was a highlight of the summer. Dates |