By Andrew Walker
You know what I hear a lot when I'm reading about the ROM? Well, a lot of things, actually; they're pretty big. Actually, that's the main thing – they're pretty big! It always amazed me when I was younger to think that for every artefact you could see in a public gallery, there are thousands more unseen. How could it be? And who are the people behind the scenes who catalogue, study, go through, and, above all, understand all of them?
And this is just what's on display...
Apparently now I'm halfway to being one of them. After weeks of writing blogs on any gallery I could get close to, I began to find that even though I was writing about something different every time, it was slowly becoming monotonous. Once I was told that the release of the main project under which I'd been working had been pushed into January (previously November), the idea of blog after blog settled in, and I decided to say something about that.
I initially found this opportunity as a result of my interest in the fields of history and (among other elements of the communications field) social media. Without the project launch, there's actually very little in the way of social media content to be created for it. Still, when the project is finished, it will be worthwhile to have as much content as possible ready-made for release. And, unsurprisingly enough, content goes beyond words. Most people won't spend very long reading a web page, but it only takes a second or two to notice a picture... and the ROM photographs a lot of their stuff. And so, while I, a lowly intern, will likely never be permitted to hold these most ancient and fragile objects, but I can still stare at them and be in awe of their nature through the magic of photography.
From here, it really doesn't look like you could fit all that much inside...
So these days, I alternate my time between creating blog and social media content, in the form of finding the best of the ROM's collections and preparing it for its next stage: editing important information onto the image (such as the object's physical dimensions, its estimated age, origin, and so on) so that the fellow who runs the place's Twitter needs to only open my fantastically organized file and be amazed at how every option available to him is a stellar one.
That's the idea, anyway. So far it's panning out nicely. The difficult part about it all is not knowing quiet yet how or when what will be used (bet you had to read that more than once...). I like to think of making someone's life a little bit easier in the coming months, but it's difficult to say for certain how or if my work will be used, and if it will be, whether or not it will be in the way I've envisioned it.
I suppose, as is so often the case with historic study, time will tell.