May 02, 2019
Hannah is currently a JC1 student at Temasek Junior college. She joined the NUS Museum for three weeks as part of Temasek Junior College’s Work Attachment Programme. During her time here as an NUS Museum intern, Hannah was tasked to assist with the cataloging of the NUS Museum’s Resource Library, she also shares with us her take on a number of artworks from our ‘Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversations about Art’ exhibition.
Through this blog, I intend to share my experiences and the skills I learned whilst being attached to the NUS Museum. I will include my tasks during the course of my attachment and more. I was able to experience many things over the period of this WOW! program, including visits to several other museums in Singapore such as the Asian Civilisation Museum and the NUS Baba House. I also got to work on the cataloguing of the NUS Museum Resource Library. I learned a variety of valuable skills such as perseverance, hard work, artwork analysis and research skills.
The two main tasks assigned to us are: Creating a gallery guide from scratch and cataloguing the resource library. For the creation of the Gallery Guide, the aim of such a task was to compile a series of quotes into a guide for visitors to be able to understand the different perspectives of the various artworks in the exhibition. On the other hand, the aim of cataloguing the resource library was to create an easily accessible classified table containing all the books, catalogues, magazines, etc. that the resource library contained.
The cataloguing of the library involves a long-term aim of the museum’s management team to eventually put out this catalogue to the public through their website so that it can be easily accessed by students and others who may require the resources from the library for research and projects. At the point I joined the project, the status of the project was halfway done by the NUS interns. In order to catalogue all the books, we took down each book from the shelves and recorded key information (title, author/editor, publisher, year of publication, place of publication, language of publication, country/region and category) in an excel sheet.