Student Projects Program
The University of Melbourne’s Student Projects Program (Cultural Collections) provides students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, with a wonderful opportunity to work with one or more of the many fascinating and diverse cultural collections owned by the University.
Students from a broad range of disciplines including history, science, engineering, music, cultural conservation, art history and curatorship, as well as many more areas of study, benefit from the insights, experience, skills and opportunities acquired through participation in the program. While some students join the program to gain vocational experience as part of a course requirement, others take up a placement for much broader reasons; a long held interest in a collection or the simple desire to learn new skills relevant to their career path.
Student Project: Collection Management – Cataloguing Assistant, Henry Forman Atkinson Dental Museum.
The program is open to students from both within and external to Melbourne University. Jasmine Targett, a final year Bachelor of Fine Arts student at Monash University, Caulfield campus, recently took up a student project with the Henry Forman Atkinson Dental Museum.
Over the past few weeks Jasmine has been working with the museum's collection of approximately 250 dental extracting instruments which date from c.1750s to the present day, ensuring that the instruments are fully catalogued by reviewing and expanding on the existing catalogue worksheets. Jasmine is checking all the current information against the original maker’s catalogues, recording the dimensions of each artefact, renumbering where necessary, checking for inscriptions and finally, assessing and recording the object's basic condition.
The information Jasmine has gathered will be added to the electronic database and eventually uploaded to form part of the collection’s online catalogue.
For information on the Student Projects Program; http://www.unimelb.edu.au/culturalcollections/projects/
For a list of the projects including dental museum projects; http://www.unimelb.edu.au/culturalcollections/projects/projectslist.html