Almost There

My internship will be over in the next few weeks and I feel like I haven’t accomplished my goal of transforming the history center into an example of how to help the visually impaired. I am old enough and mature enough to understand that a few months within the grand scheme of a government facility is far too little to get everything accomplished but I still have time.

The 3D printing is the one thing I can do these next two weeks to have something tangible and I will get started on Monday. I went with my supervisor to a “heritage partners” meeting as the representative of the Polk County Historical Association. We are attempting to bring all the partners together in an effort to help each other. This affects what I am doing in the history center because every one of these heritage partners is a local community museum. Lake Alfred, Winter Haven, Kathleen, Haines City and Eagle Lake were represented. The trouble with Polk County is that it used to be one major history association which is the one I represent, but over the years people moved into the country from other states and took an interest only in their very local community without realizing that the county, traditionally, has acted as one . Families moved from settlement to settlement and are still located all over. Polk County is one of the only places I know of where people will answer with the county first when asked where in Florida they live. So my goal is to get them all to work together so that people from one community will be come interested in the others. This is a “rising tide lifts all boats” situation.

At the meeting I talked to the museum directors, really volunteers who open them on weekends, and told them about my app and my goal for helping the visually impaired. They agreed that they would like their museums to be connected to our app eventually. This will mirror what I am doing with the PCHA website, which is to have a landing page for each community and each community’s historical association. Hopefully someone will click our main page and be able to explore the county and then go visit these other museums and then use my app to learn more about what is there.

So while I feel like I am not accomplishing the stated goal of making the history center in Bartow a gold standard facility for those with visual impairment, I can see some light at the end of the tunnel with making it better for everyone in all the communities of the county. There is still the option to listen to the app, which could be useful for those smaller museums as well, so there is that. I will be interested to see how this plays out beyond my stated dates for the internship since I won’t be stopping once the academic requirement does.