National Volunteer Month

April is National Volunteer Month so in this post, I'd like to describe what some of the volunteers at the Benton County Historical Society do.  Many volunteers work in the collections department.  After the Peter and Rosalie Johnson Collection Center was built, boxes of objects were trucked over from Oregon State where they joined those containing the Benton County collection. Larger items were directly to large shelves; the boxes were piled on pallets. Retrieving any one object for exhibition often meant moving many boxes – the desired box always seemed to be on the bottom of the pallet!

Once the tracked shelving was installed, the process of moving objects onto the shelves began. Under the direction of Collections Manager Mary Gallagher, volunteers unpack the boxes, check each item's condition, and make sure the computer records are accurate. Then other volunteers photograph each object.

Some volunteers make special packages of archival materials to keep the objects from tipping over on a shelf or to keep them from sliding around in a drawer. 

Then the items are placed on shelves or in drawers and the new location and the photograph are entered into the museum's database. That's Mary Gallagher on the ladder; volunteers are not supposed to climb ladders. 

Other volunteers in the collections department scan photographs and slides.

The Benton County Collection also included many books and documents, including the first-hand accounts of school days or wartime service that I've quoted in earlier posts. Volunteers who work with these items summarize the contents, scan the covers of booklets, and make sure the document is stored appropriately. 

Some volunteers work in the Exhibitions department.  I've described what I do (besides write for the blog) in the post of March 30, 2017. Another volunteer edits label copy and works on the exhibitions portion of the museum's web page and a third frames photographs and documents for exhibitions as well as helping Mark Tolonen make mounts.
 

The docents are a group of volunteers who take the educational trunks out to schools for special programs are help out when a teacher brings a class to the museum.

Others help by preparing items for mailing and at special events such as family day. Fifteen people serve on the Board of Directors and others on the Campaign Committee to raise funds for the new museum building. What we all share is a love of history and the fun of learning about a diverse collection of items.

collections of objects from the past. 

By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon