You know those subscription boxes that you can sign up for, to receive a new adventure kit or craft project or some such thing every month?
Well, they’re coming to the Creston Museum. Or, at least, they will be if you can help us create them!
Each kit will let subscribers go behind the scenes at the museum and solve a mystery. Maybe it’s a box full of random items that got dropped off at the door – can they figure out who these things belonged to? Perhaps it’s an unidentified person in a photograph, or some strange shenanigans showing up in the newspapers. Whatever the mystery, the kit contains reproductions of historic documents, photographs of objects, and everything else they need to puzzle out the problem!
We hope to have a dozen different mystery boxes ready to go this fall. You can create one, or two, or ten – it’s entirely up to you! Just choose the theme of your box, then dive deep into the Museum’s collections to find and reproduce the objects and documents that will help people solve the mystery!
Time Commitment: Perhaps 15-20 hours per kit, depending on the mystery you’re creating and/or solving (some will take more research than others). The actual times and days of work are entirely up to you! We’d like to have the kits ready for distribution in early to mid September.
Requirements: If you really enjoy digging through historic documents to piece together answers, this is a job for you! Computer skills and some ability with scanners, digital cameras, and the like are important. This is a really good opportunity for teamwork, too – if you love the research but don’t want to deal with computers, scanners, and graphic design, maybe partner up with someone in your social bubble who loves the tech stuff but is not into old newspapers!
We’re COVID conscious! Some of the work might be able to be done from home – searching online newspapers, for example, if your mystery centres on a topic from 1935 or earlier. Accessing the physical collections means coming in to the Museum, of course, but we schedule volunteers to make sure we can maintain distances; masks are required; and we sanitize work spaces between users.