NMAI Workshop

On October 20, 2007, a team of students and staff from Hannahville Indian School, aka Nah Tah Whash PSA, flew to Washington, DC to participate in a Virtual Museum Workshop at the National Museum of the American Indian's Cultural Resources Center (CRC). The CRC, located across the Anacostia River in Suitland, Maryland, is the state-of-the-art collections facility that houses over 800,000 Native American objects. The goal of the workshop was to learn how to put together a virtual exhibition of Potawatomi culture based on over 30 objects the team had selected from NMAI collections. The school plans to use the training and student work that comes out of the workshop to create virtual exhibits for the new Hannahville Culture Center.

On the first day of the workshop, the team got a tour of the CRC, spending time with Collections staff looking at many items of interest stored in the secure, climate-controlled heart of the building. They also got to visit with Conservation staff and learn how the staff applies scientific knowledge and problem-solving to repair and prepare cultural items for exhibitions.

Once the workshop got underway, the students spent the remaining week researching and writing about each selected Potawatomi item with help from Rich Sgarlotti, the schools Projects Coordinator, Eric Janofski, computer and technology educator, Angela Bouelly, culture teacher, and Arlene Boelter, elder. While some students did research and writing, the rest were busy learning how to use professional digital still cameras to take pictures of each object. Some of the objects were shot on a turntable for every 10° of rotation. Later in the workshop they would learn how to assemble those images into QuickTime Virtual Reality object movies that enable people to rotate the virtual objects on a computer screen. Other objects were shot "flat" with a high resolution digital camera. Those images were used to create Zoomify Flash media which enables people to zoom in on any area of the high resolution image to examine close details of the object. The students also learned how to assemble their interactive imagery and writing into Web pages using Adobe Dreamweaver.

The Hannahville school has conducted many student technology projects that explore the history and culture of the community. They plan to take the experience of the virtual museum workshop to propose similar student projects with other regional museums and history centers. They have already approached the Field Museum in Chicago to propose future project.