This week's work, and the next:

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 14:35:03 GMT

This week was slow going. I've mostly been e-mailing people: I still need to find whoever knows anything about the collection journal, or find out if they exist at all. I've yet to put up my climate monitors, a task which is ostensibly late for me to do (though not disastrously so), and I've still my task of 'establish rapport with my supervisor'.
However, I did get my thoughts together to book a meeting with him, and I've managed to book several other meetings afterward, which is great news! So, hopefully I'll be able to work more consistently now that I've kickstarted that collaboration.

Next week will surely be more e-mails, but I have gotten some good texts to read. And I've a sort of "homework" for the next couple supervisor meetings, which will hopefully encourage me to keep my momentum.

For now I'm hoping to hear from the meteorite expert, whom last had anything to do with the collection in 2015. I hope he hasn't forgotten where or who is responsible for those loaned specimens in the past decade...

I'll be taking pictures of the collection space tomorrow when I finally set up my climate monitors, but they likely won't be great. Firstly, the collection space is a mess, and secondly, I'm not taking documentation-grade photos, and I'm using an old camera for it. But the photos will be there, and I will be sure to share them.

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Thesis begins!

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 15:02:35 GMT

My thesis project has officially begun! I'm working with an old mineralogy- and geology teaching collection at a local university.

So far I have only briefly looked through the collection storage facilities, and that may be a very generous description. Water damage(s), tempterature fluctuations, pests, no shelves, containers precariously positioned on pallets and the like... And so on. I'll be setting up climate monitors some time in the coming week, while I figure out which rooms require what kind of attention, as well as getting an idea of exactly how extensive potential damages are - there's a lot of shelves in this collection, and any of of them may or may not be full of damaged specimens that I have not yet been able to see.

The university wants to eventually move the collection into one location at the moment, but the room they want to move the collection into is one of aforementioned water-damaged rooms. I'll have to see if I can present a convincing argument in the form of "Please Do Not" by the end of this process, which hopefully shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I've got a couple things to do in the coming weeks, mostly consisting of 'setting up climate monitors' and 'emails'. I need to figure out who may have access to the old collection journals. My biggest mystery yet...

Included here: A specimen, not bread.

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The Conservator

This week's work, and the next:

Thesis begins!