Meet Jane
Volunteer Archivist Jane Martell has been a fixture around the Sandwich Glass Museum for over 20 years now. She was recruited as a volunteer by the curator at the time, Neshka, toward the end of Bruce Courson’s tenure as Museum director. At the time the museum’s collection was maintained on paper. Just like libraries back in the day, each item was recorded on its own index card, which was then filed in numbered boxes. Not the easiest system to search! Over dinner one evening Neshka and Eliane Thomas were describing their need for a digital record of these cards. And what a fortuitous meeting that was, since Jane was a recently retired mathematician and educator, and was looking for something to do in retirement. After 38 years teaching math, PE, art, social studies and computing to learners of all ages from kindergarten to adults, Jane was looking for a new challenge. She was already familiar with computers, as she had taught computer skills starting with a paper tape computing machine back in the early dawn of the modern computer age. Data entry holds no fear for someone who has taught classes ranging from Basic and Logo on Ataris to word processing on Macs!
The initial proposal involved a desktop database, but when that turned out to not meet the project’s requirement that information be readily discoverable, Jane surveyed the market and picked out a commercial product, Past Perfect, then as it is now the industry standard for digitizing a museum’s collection.
Fast forward to the present day, and history has proven Jane’s foresight and acumen - we still use Past Perfect for our museum’s permanent collection and archives, and have recently rolled out a public portal to our holdings, available on this site.
When asked what she thought was the most memorable experience of her 20 years as the Sandwich Glass Museum’s principal archivist, Jane smiled and says she still remembers how happy she was once the task of cataloging 764 different cup plates was finally concluded. That’s a lot of different cup plates!
Her favorite pass times are walking - when traveling she tends to prefer walking tours. She also enjoys reading, doing puzzles, and her continued regular visits to the back office at the Sandwich Glass Museum to enter data on new acquisitions into Past Perfect. “Everyone here is always so appreciative - it’s a really nice change for me”, she says. Teaching, it seems, can be a pretty thankless occupation.
Looking ahead to the future, Jane talks of still finding things that were pushed into a corner and forgotten about and is considering taking stock of current holdings and where they are located. After years of acquisitions the shelf naming system has become somewhat idiosyncratic, apparently, and some items in the system are still not fully documented.
Sounds like we have enough interesting work to keep her coming back to us for many years to come.
