Volunteering at the Museum

Volunteers are the backbone of the Santa Fe Trail Center--they help visitors in the gift shop, give tours to school groups, help build exhibits, restore historic buildings, catalog artifacts, scan images, complete data entry, and much more. In fact, there is a volunteer project for every interest and skill level. Whether you love history or are simply looking for something to do, the Trail Center would love to have you come out and talk about the many volunteer opportunities available.

 

 

Curator Job Announcement

 

HERE ARE A FEW OF OUR CURRENT AND ONGOING VOLUNTEER PROJECTS

Magic Glass Lantern Slide Project

The museum recently began the long and arduous process of scanning late 19th and early 20th century Glass Magic Latern Slides. The 2300 images were taken by R.R. "Comrade" Smith, a local eccentric photographer who traveled all over the world. Included in his collections are images of Jeruselum, Damascus, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Santa Fe Trail, and early day Larned. Please click on the links below to see some of the images scanned to date. Use your browser's back button to return to this page.

Presbyterian Church	Train Going Through Town
Fort Larned

 

Collections Management Project

Another long term project occuring at the Trail Center is the task of entering all of the museums collections records into a Collections Management database. The program, Past Perfect, was recently purchased by the curator and will allow for easier access and clearer record keeping of the collections once all of the data has been entered. Because the museum has such extensive three dimensional, archival, and photograph collections this will take thousands of hours and many volunteers to complete. Anyone interested in helping out on this project is encouraged to contact the curator at curator@santafetrailcenter.org.

 

Tour Guides

Every year, hundreds of students come through the museum on school tours. While here a tour guide takes them through the exhibit galleries and into the historic buildings on the Trail Center grounds. These guides put in many volunteer hours researching the history of the Santa Fe Trail and Kansas, and into understanding the changes that have occured along the trail as trains and cities made their way west. If you like children and enjoy teaching contact the Education Director at ed-ex@santafetrailcenter.org