Olivia Finley Interns at Blaine County Museum

2015 Chinook High School graduate, Olivia Finley has been doing a fantastic job as an intern at the Blaine County Museum, and Museum Director, Samantha French couldn't be happier to have had her services available, "Olivia started as a cataloging intern last July. The museum was a recipient of a $10,000 grant courtesy of the Foundation for Montana History. The grant was written for the purpose of hiring a cataloging intern at Blaine County Museum to assist with an inventory of the museum's document, book, map, photo, and print archives."

French talked about the need for having someone on site, "For years, seasonal water intrusion issues in the facility's basement have created a poor environment for the storage of archival materials, particularly paper materials. Following the inventory, the materials would be moved off-site to a dry, temporary storage location. The museum board and I collaborated with the county to establish storage in a separate county building, where materials could be safely housed until a permanent solution is established. The Foundation internship project was to last 8 months, and the intern would work 20 hours/week. In that time frame, I hoped we could inventory and move the majority of our paper materials off-site."

Well, the time has come and gone and the result was spectacular, "The internship project exceeded my expectations, due to the outstanding intern we hired to complete the inventory. As luck would have it, near the start of the internship period, Olivia moved back to town with an Anthropology and Sociology degree from University of Utah in tow," commented French. "Due to the pandemic, Olivia didn't get the opportunity to participate in any internships during her degree program. With an interest in entering the museum and library field, the cataloging internship was a perfect fit for her."

French couldn't be more pleased with the job Olivia has done, "She successfully inventoried not the majority, but nearly all the museum's archival resources. By the end of her project period in February, Olivia had sleeved, stored, and inventoried over 10,400 items, boxed and inventoried nearly 900 books, and created over 150 boxes of materials to be moved off-site. So, materials can be accounted for during the move, she created an Access database that gave each box an identification number, and listed the contents and location of each box."

There is still more to be done, "Remaining to date to be inventoried are postcards from the Charles E. Morris Collection, aerial photographs of Blaine County, perhaps a dozen oversized maps and documents, and the bulk of the museum's photographic print archive, the latter of which was moved off-site in 2021. The county is helping the museum keep Olivia employed through the end of April, and there is an outside funding opportunity that could help us keep her through May or June, and she would be conducting the photo inventory during that time," said French.

The whole process was a long one and doubts seemed to creep in now and again, "I was worried that it would be difficult to make a meaningful dent in the inventory, because the nature of the work can be very tedious. The internship project consisted of up to four hours a day of data entry in the quiet of the museum basement. However, Olivia genuinely enjoyed the internship, and even preferred the independent, repetitive nature of the work. "I made it through over 20 audio books" said Olivia of her time sleeving and boxing materials and conducting inventory entries.

French added, "She even told me, in spite of the low-key nature of the project, she thought there was 'never a dull moment'. She enjoyed getting side-tracked during the project, becoming engrossed in the reading of old documents and enjoyed reading correspondences in the C.R. Noyes Collection and also liked seeing the baby photos in the A.M. Allison Portrait Collection, and even found a baby picture of her great aunt, Marilyn Hall."

French commented on the museums struggles to keep everything inventoried, "Since the museum has always had staffing limitations, we have never had a complete database of the documents in our collection, as it is extremely difficult to keep up with incoming materials as a staff of one. While the inventory functions as a way to keep track of materials being moved out of the basement, it will also serve as a tremendous resource for researchers. Olivia determined only 42% of the materials she inventoried had catalog records and the other 58% either had no associated catalog record or were not previously documented at all."

In the end it would certainly be nice to keep Olivia on board, "I hope that we can find a way to keep Olivia at the museum on a permanent basis. Although the museum is limiting the number of donations it accepts at this time due to storage limitations, there will always be some degree of incoming materials to care for. And, while an inventory exists thanks to Olivia, the collection must still be entered into the museum's cataloging software. Olivia has started an inventory of the museum's textile collection, and an inventory of the museum's 3-D object collection is also in order."

Olivia said of her internship the past eight months, "Blaine County has such important history, and I am glad I was able to help preserve that."