About the Producer
My name is Nolan Mann and I made this website for a class while an undergraduate student at the State University at Albany. In December of 2007 I earned a Bachelors degree in American History. I plan to continue my studies in history at the graduate and eventually even the doctoral level.
During my last semester there I participated in an internship at the New York Sate Museum as a curatorial aid under Geoffrey Stein in the history department. This was a great experience that taught me many things. Among them I accumulated an immense amount of knowledge and learned the workings of the position as curator and a job that I am hoping to pursue in the mean time before I get a PhD.
While with the NYSM I worked on a couple of projects where it was my job to identify and catalogue various artifacts including the ones provided on this website. For each object I read through books and used online sources to find out information. I had to decipher the minutest details and write a detailed and sourced description of the artifacts.
When getting a group of artifacts there is a process to handling them. First you must write up a list of the relics. Next you go one by one and research and catalogue the items like I described above. Lastly, you have to mark the artifact with its individually given number. This number is the year it was given to the museum, a period, the number donation it was of that year, another period, and finally what number it was in the list. For instance, if it was the 2nd item of the 24th allotment of 2007 it would have the number 2007.24.2. In order to write this number on the artifact I first applied white nail polish on a small section of it, than used a special marker to write the number and finally painted on the number with clear nail polish. This final coat provided a protection for the number.
Email: NolanMann@gmail.com