Summer at the Sindecuse

It’s been a busy summer here at the Sindecuse Museum! For one thing, we’re excited to show off our new website. It has all the same rich resources like exhibit pages, our PastPerfect catalog and our page of other dental resources plus the new Tooth Fairy exhibit page, and improvements like a search bar on the main page so visitors can search the whole site. Oh, and this blog -- which gives us an easy, casual way to let you know about updates.

Our exhibits and workroom are in the same complex of buildings as the Dental Clinic, and their main entrance is under construction. With patients being rerouted, our hallway has had more traffic than usual. It’s been a nice opportunity to chitchat with people who stop to look at artifacts in our five hall cases.

This summer, the other museum assistant Gina Genova and I each had internships as part of the Master’s of Information program at U-M’s School of Information. Gina went home to Houston for internships at M.D. Anderson Research Medical Library and at Rice University. I stayed home, interning at the Archives of Michigan in Lansing, which allowed me to keep working one day a week at the Sindecuse.

A lantern slide from Accession 0646 at the Sindecuse Museum, which we scanned this summer, shows a dentist in a white jacket working in the mouth of a seated patient.

I’m so glad I did! This summer I got to help out with our gorgeous new website, which is our main chance to reach audiences who can’t visit us in person. We’ve continued with ongoing inventory and cataloging projects, and I even got to tag along to visit the Stearns Collection of musical instruments up on North Campus to research an exhibit we’re developing.  

We like to share interesting museum objects and records, so next time I’ll share some recent favorites.

- Museum assistant Meredith Counts, MSI candidate 2020 at U-M’s School of Information