How I spent my summer vacation

Volunteer coordinator Jane Flounders writes in our newsletter Stamford Pioneer, Fall 2009:

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

First came Amanda Bucci, a sophomore at Eastern Connecticut State University. She told us she was hoping to major in Museum Sciences. She wasn’t able to find a job this summer, so she was interested in volunteering with us. Tom Zoubek immediately put her to work as the lead worker on our long hoped for inventory. Amanda sorted, cleaned, noted, measured, cross referenced, hand lettered accession numbers and compiled inventory records for items in our porcelain, toy, arms, baskets, boxes and small silver pieces. Her summer began to take on a feel of a personal seminar in curatorial tasks. Subsequently, she went to work polishing chairs and tables as well as correcting curatorial notes for these collections.

The shortage of summer employment opportunities soon brought Caroline Johnson, Colgate 2011, to us. She began working in the chair room, which had been cleaned of the heavy dirt and dust by Alex Zavoluk’s Boy Scout team. Ronnie Minkoff joined Caroline right after her graduation from West Hill High School. The two became our chair experts. They were later joined by Amanda, and together they cleaned, measured, checked accession numbers and matched records for our collection of wood chairs. They even moved on to work on the furniture in the table and mirror room.

Elizabeth Packer, Vassar 2011, brought organization to our photo collection which had suffered the loss of our photo archivist this spring. Elizabeth, working with Dan Ifrate from AITE, reviewed our files and subject headings making sure that both are in order. Claire Delcourt, College of William and Mary 2011, is doing a cross departmental project for us in that she is working with the original Whitman Bailey drawings housed in our photo collection and matching them to printed material contained in the research library. The resulting compilation will be of great benefit to future researchers.

Francesca Fiore, recently graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology, found our Textile Collection to be a treasure. She has worked with Margaret Bowen in dealing with the many items that had to be postponed because of the window renovation project.

Anna Bishop, University of Southern California 2012, and Freddy Breslow, Lawrence College 2012, are doing research for Tom Zoubek for our fall exhibit. They have tracked down biographical information about many of the Society’s earliest members that will be used to write captions for our 100th anniversary exhibit.

Thanks to these young volunteers, the Society has made great strides in our inventory project and we have been able to tackle long delayed projects. We are thankful to all of these young people and hope they enjoyed themselves as much as we enjoyed having them with us.