Day 5: Presenting!

Today was really exciting! I am pleased to say that I got to officially present today in front of the malacology exhibit. 

This morning, I got to signing in and leaving my bags, then got to extracting the touch cart from its original space, and briefly brought it to another empty classroom on the lower floors. I took a bit of time to briefly review the specimens again, seeing the research papers for those for more information, and did some mock presentations before I went up again. 

Ms. Leap had, yesterday, showed me a place she recommended I set up with the touch cart in order to get the most flow of visitors. That spot is the junction between the malacology exhibit and the hall of gems and minerals. Since the stairs were in the immediate vicinity when it began nearing 10, it started getting pretty crowded... 

There were groups of younger students coming and going for the majority of my set-up, and I discovered pretty quickly that small children will want to touch the "up for grabs" samples immediately... and shells are really delicate... so you can guess my predicament. 

I tried to give basic explanations of the samples I had on hand to the smaller children and gave more elaborate answers to the parents or staff members. All the while, the groups of younger visitors would be trying to either touch or grab the specimens on the cart. So, after a couple more presentations where this was occurring in all of them, I decided to swap out the smaller shells I had chosen to display with bigger, heavier ones. This gave the children something to explore without the danger of fully picking it up. 

There was smoother sailing after that.

Here is a small snapshot of the set-up. 

I couldn't take a picture while I was actually presenting since I did not have the permission from the parents. (Also, I feel it would have interrupted the flow of the display if I had started taking pictures throughout anyways.) 

I continued to present until there was little less than an hour left at my time at the museum. After that, I placed the specimens in their respective containers, locked up, and put the cart back in its rightful place. 

With the time I had left, Ms. Leap took me to the paleontology exhibit to see the touch carts there. I chose one in the permian period, simply because it had interesting objects behind the glass panel. Again, we took it to a spare room, and I started exploring what this one had to offer. 

It might not be obvious from the picture, but this touch cart had way more objects than the malacology one. But, while the mollusks were all authentic and there were no replicas, this cart had mostly casts and models, with a few actual fossils. 

They were all interesting though, but I didn't get a chance to look at all of them thoroughly due to lack of time. I did, however, manage to print a copy of the manual for this cart. So I'll be reviewing that during the weekend. Hopefully that'll mean that I will be sufficiently prepared to present it on my immediate arrival on Monday. 

That concludes my day at HMNS!