(calm music) (lens beeping) (pensive music) - Thanks for "Exploring the Heartland" with us.

I'm Fred Martino, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.

As you enter the museum in this grand plaza, you see entrances to various permanent exhibits, marvelous displays that take you back in time.

And we begin this program with a look at how these exhibits come together.

- For us, the story is king.

(dramatic orchestral music) We allow the story to drive the decisions that we make, and for history, it means trying to make it relevant to the person who's standing in this space.

- When we're designing an exhibit, we do spend a lot of time thinking about how is this gonna be viewed from the public standpoint?

We will do mockups, we'll walk around at every different possible angle.

- Within our own division, we have people that have an amazing array of talents, from people that fabricate, to design, to do graphics, electromechanical, video design.

We are looking for ways to tell stories in our spaces, and the team is made up of those votes.

- With our mountmaking, we start out with the four-by-eight sheet of plexi.

We attach it to uprights as well as a base, and then we bring it to our flaming area in the back, and it takes it from a very dull, kind of opaque edge to crystal clear again.

The challenge is making sure that it's not seen.

The artifact is meant to be displayed.

- Installing an artifact is really a team effort.

We have a registrar on staff whose job is the safety of the artifacts.

Certain artifacts, for example, anything that's paper, can only have five footcandles of light on it.

So we have to be very mindful to protect the artifact.

The thing I like about this museum is we go an extra level.

When the original designers were making the museum, their mantra was, close isn't good enough.

And I like the fact that we still hold that high standard.

- I think it's our responsibility to be meaningful.

To a certain extent, the expectation of our patrons is that they're gonna come in here and they're gonna learn something.

They're going to be engaged.

The stories we tell have to be meaningful.

So we, again, rely on our partners in-house, the researchers, to help us develop meaningful stories to tell.

They have to be accurate, but they also have to mean something to people.

- I think a lot of people, too, come to the museum, they're expecting glass boxes mounted to the wall, and when they come through, they actually have a visceral, emotional connection to the museum.

I don't think a lot of people expect that when they walk through the door.

- People are standing in the presence of something real, something authentic, something that makes a story come to life for them.

- It's worth the trip to spend a couple of hours with Abraham Lincoln.

- What a great behind-the-scenes look at how these exhibits come together.

And we're going to hear more about the exhibits now from the executive director of the Presidential Library and Museum, Christina Shutt.

(warm orchestral music) The executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Christina Shutt.

- Thanks for being here today.

We're so excited to have you here in Springfield.

- It is so good to have you here.

Let's get into these permanent exhibits.

I am just blown away.

And we're gonna begin with Journey One.

This is Lincoln's life, growing up through his 1860 campaign for president.

- Well, you know, I love Journey One of our beautiful exhibits.

One of the things I love about it is it's taking what could be just a textbook that most people kind of come in with their understanding of Lincoln's life, and it's immersing you into his life.

It's giving you that authentic feel, even down to things like the log cabin, which is an actual log cabin from the same time period that Lincoln would've lived in the cabin, although of course not the original cabin that Lincoln lived in.

But things like the log cabin, things like the trees, which were cast from real trees in Southern Illinois, help to immerse you in Lincoln's life story.

As you walk through that log cabin, you see Lincoln's journey down the Mississippi River on a flatboat.

You learn about how he grew up, right?

Not just experiencing slavery in New Orleans, but also growing up in New Salem and all of his sort of experiments as a shopkeeper and a postmaster.

You get to see what his Lincoln-Berry Store would've been like and how he gets that moniker, Honest Abe.

As you continue through Journey One, you learn about things like Lincoln's law practice, his marriage to Mary Lincoln, and how important that relationship was to his future career.

You get to see things like the Lincoln-Douglas debate, which, as you know, really propels Lincoln into that national spotlight as people are learning about Lincoln's views on anti-slavery.

And, of course, we end Journey One seeing a little bit, kind of a snapshot with Tim Russert, you know, showcasing to you the 1860 election and showing you how it was a sort of four-way election that was very fraught and how that sort of worked out, where Lincoln ultimately ends up with 39% of the vote.

And then we end Journey One in that sort of bittersweet spot as Lincoln is saying farewell to Springfield.

And his words, right?

He doesn't know whether he'll return or not, but he knows that the challenge ahead of him is so important, not just to the people of Springfield, but really to the nation.

- From the grand plaza as you walk into the museum, you'll also see the entrance to Journey Two.

It's unmistakable, a replica of the White House.

Inside, though, there is so much more.

It's a journey through the pain and tragedy of the Civil War and Lincoln's remarkable presidency.

(warm orchestral music) Let's move to Journey Two.

This is the Civil War and, of course, Lincoln's presidency.

- And so in Journey Two, you get this stark contrast between Lincoln, who grew up in a log cabin, and the beautiful White House, which I believe is about 1/12 the size of the original White House, the executive mansion.

And so as you walk through that, you see things like the Gettysburg Mural, which reminds you of the sacrifice people made on the battlefield, and, of course, Lincoln's remarks in dedicating that important historical monument and place.

(warm orchestral music) - The Treasures Gallery is truly amazing, and there are always new items coming into it, items that must be preserved for future generations.

And that brings us to our second report produced for the museum.

It talks about the process of preservation and conservation.

(cheerful music) - By preserving the historical materials in our collections, we're preserving our history, our culture.

It is really a privilege to be able to get a personal look at these items, to be able to protect them.

- The Conservation Lab is ensuring that our items are safe and accessible, because we don't want to just have them sitting on a shelf in a locked room, we want people accessing them.

- My favorite thing about this job would be our Picturing Lincoln project.

It's an initiative to digitize a lot of the items in our collection.

We wanna make it more accessible and discoverable to the public.

It's also important for preserving the physical items we have here.

- [Matthew] We don't just cover, you know, the Civil War era.

Our library also preserves Illinois history, not necessarily just during Lincoln's time, but more recent history.

- Anything audiovisual you can think of we probably have here in our collection.

Photographs, paintings, illustrations, posters and things of that nature, DVDs, film, even some vinyl records.

- We have lots of researchers coming to use things in our collection.

- [Bonnie] The various elements that contribute to deterioration and threat to artifacts, there's a lot that's involved in the environment.

Exposure to light, inappropriate temperatures, heat, and moisture are all factors that cause damage.

A typical process is that the staff might find something that they would like me to have a look at, so I'll go have a look at the piece and do a condition assessment and figure out what kind of treatments will actually help this piece.

- I love all the tools we employ to clean or mend items for exhibit.

There's quite a lot of variety in the work we do.

One of the techniques I like is the process of cleaning documents or photos, and what we use is ground-up eraser crumbs.

We do slow, careful circular motions to clean something.

Another tool we use quite often is our board shear.

We can cut through corrugated cardboard, map board, all kinds of things.

- [Kelsey] We wanna teach everyone the history here, and anyone that's interested should be able to seek out our items.

- Such a fascinating look at the efforts to preserve and conserve many of the artifacts here.

Walking through this museum, you're struck by something else.

Everywhere you turn, there's historically accurate music, as we're hearing now behind me, beautiful murals, as you see behind me, and more artifacts that tell the story of Lincoln's life and presidency.

So the question now is, what's next?

What is on the wishlist for this national treasure?

(warm orchestral music) - So this might be one of my favorite places in the museum because we get to bring things out of our vault and showcase to the public the incredible rich treasures of the State of Illinois.

You know, we've been collecting since the 1890s, and we're so proud to not only be the home for Lincoln but the home for Illinois history and exploring the life and legacy of America's favorite president.

- Christina, there are so many important items that are already here.

What is on the museum's list for possible acquisitions in the future?

- Well, we always have our eye out for those items that are important to telling the Lincoln story, to telling the story of Illinois, and really, of course, the American story, you know, this broader story that we tell about who we are as a people.

While we don't have any specific wishlist items, you know, I will say some of my favorite things that we have acquired over the years have really come as a result of people wanting to share their family heirlooms with the people of Illinois.

It's as a result of people wanting to say, hey, this belongs to the people, to the public.

We wanna share this, we don't want it to just be for our family but really for all people.

- Are there some specific artifacts that you'd like to tell us about?

- Well, I think some of my favorites are things like Mary Lincoln's wedding skirt, things like the door handle that Lincoln turned every day when he went into his house just a few blocks from here.

I love that we get to highlight the everyday items, items that you yourself or your visitors may remember using themselves.

And so it's such a great way to connect with the past with items that are those kind of everyday items that are very meaningful to people.

- In addition to family heirlooms, where else do these items usually come from?

- Well, sometimes people purchase items for us or on our behalf, and we're so grateful that the governor, J.B. Pritzker, and his wife, M.K.

Pritzker, have generously purchased a document, a naval blockade document for our collections.

This document is so important because it's really showcasing Lincoln's kind of first military action that he takes against this Southern insurgency that is attempting to overthrow the United States government.

And so we're so grateful and thankful to them for their generous donation of the document that will help us tell a more complex story about how the Civil War begins and Lincoln's role in that, how he was directing, as commander in chief, a naval blockade.

- Can you talk a little bit about the difference between conservation and preservation?

- Well, so conservation is really about conserving a document for the future.

And so I tend to think of those as things that are more specific, right?

We're working on a specific document or a specific item in the collection, and that's really what that conservation piece is.

Preservation is something that we actually do all the time at the ALPLM.

You're actually a part of the preservation as you sit here, you're sitting in a climate-controlled room, a room in which we control the light and the UV rays that are coming into the building.

And that's one kind of component of that preservation piece.

We're preserving objects on a larger scale for future generations.

- I understand that there is a rare Lincoln photo that you have here that you want to tell us about.

- Yes, one of my favorite recent acquisitions here at the ALPLM is a photograph from, I believe it's 1858.

It's actually an ambrotype photograph of Lincoln, it's one of two.

Lincoln actually gave this ambrotype to a local family in Pittsfield, Illinois, where he was giving a speech.

The family had actually been injured, and as a sort of token of thanks, Lincoln gives this photograph to the family.

And actually the photo stays with the family for many generations until ultimately the family, having four siblings, decide that they can't split a photograph four ways, and the best place to preserve and conserve the photograph would be with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

We're so grateful for this family's donation and that they preserved this important piece of Illinois history and really an important photograph of Abraham Lincoln without a beard.

(chuckles) (warm orchestral music) - Our final video produced for the museum focuses on the volunteer program, a group that's making a difference here every day.

(lighthearted music) - My favorite room in this museum is the Gettysburg Gallery.

I go into that room before every shift.

I read the Gettysburg Address, and I get the same goosebumps every single time knowing that if I can translate the important ideals and principles to my children or to our visitors, that's really important.

- About 40% of our volunteers do not live in the Springfield area.

We have people coming from Northern Illinois, Southern Illinois, from St. Louis.

We have one volunteer that comes twice a year from North Carolina just to serve.

I think that speaks to what Lincoln means to people and what they've heard about what we do here and the ways that we serve.

- I volunteer with my husband.

My husband is a historian.

I am a special ed teacher.

It's just wonderful.

It makes history come alive, which is the whole purpose of what we do.

- We have some volunteers serving in the plaza, which is kind of the main central hub of the museum, and they're there to greet our guests coming in.

Some of them enjoy greeting buses, and we have a lot of school groups and tour groups that come in every single day.

We have volunteers strategically placed, we call 'em stationary guides, and those volunteers are more focused on the historical conversations.

Most of our volunteers, about 90%, serve on the museum side, and about 10% on the library side.

Really, if it wasn't for our volunteer team, we couldn't do what we do every day.

- I had no idea what was going on here.

I'm from a finance background, that's all I knew.

And when I came here, I was fascinated with not just Lincoln and his family, but the volunteers here, how intrigued they were.

They made it sound so exciting.

So I'm like, well, maybe I should do this.

- [Jeremy] When volunteers serve with us, we take the time and effort to learn what is different about them, what are ways that they might wanna serve that's unlike anyone else that's already on our team?

- People do not have to be historians to be facilitators here, but we'll all learn more.

- [Jeremy] We have a ton of educational programs, at least two a month that we provide for our volunteers, because the life of Lincoln is very complex.

- [Frank] Another part of the fun of being a volunteer here is people you meet, not just the visitors, but your colleagues.

- We care about each other, about your health, your wellbeing, and we even socialize, believe it or not, outside of the museum just because we grew in a bond.

- If you enjoy it and you're excited about it, that enthusiasm is contagious, and other volunteers see it, and our guests see that every day.

- You must come and see it for yourself.

And when you come to see it, you will feel it.

You will truly feel it, and you'll know if you wanna be a part of it.

- What a great look at the volunteer program here at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Behind me you can see one of the volunteers working with one of the countless groups that come through this institution, which was dedicated in 2005.

Christina Shutt told us more about what volunteers mean to her and the entire staff at the museum.

(warm orchestral music) - Well, our volunteers are really an essential part of our operations here at the ALPLM.

You'll see our volunteers, as you did in the video, where they're greeting our guests, they're taking photographs, they are helping to transcribe oral histories.

You name it, our volunteers are generally part of it.

We really couldn't have the kind of award-winning operation that we have without our volunteers.

I'm so grateful to our volunteers because they give of their time and their service.

Many of these individuals are people who had distinguished careers in their own right, and not always in history actually, but they have a passion for sharing Lincoln's life and legacy with the public.

They want to help school children understand the importance of knowing their history, and so folks volunteer to come here, as you heard in the video, you know, from as far as North Carolina.

We have folks from Omaha, all over the country, who come and choose to spend their time here at the ALPLM.

Our volunteers are such an integral part of our operations and in ways that many of our visitors don't even realize.

So one of the things that our volunteers do is they actually have little notebooks they carry with them.

And so as they overhear conversations that our visitors share about ideas they might have or questions, like, "Why is this exhibit that way?"

or, "What does this label mean?"

Our volunteers are always jotting those notes down.

And what's great about that is all of those notes are then compiled and they come to me and our incredible staff here at the ALPLM, and as we read through those notes, we think about how we can improve the visitor experience, how we can make it more meaningful for visitors.

So just to give you a quick example, one of the things that our visitors told us were that the labels were too small.

It was really hard to read the small type on the labels.

And so, you know, as our team really thought together and said, "Well, how could we address this issue?"

One of the things we came up with was to have audio transcriptions on the labels.

So now not only can people read the labels in a slightly larger font, but they can also hear the labels.

And I think what's so great about that is it adds a whole different accessibility component to the museum.

Whereas, you know, if maybe you have blind or have low vision, you now don't have to read the labels to learn about things like an important ambrotype or the Gettysburg Address.

You can actually hear it being read to you by our incredible actor team.

Again, our volunteers are so important to our operations that we have consistently won awards for it, including the TripAdvisor Best of the Best when it comes to attractions and entertainment spaces.

And we're so proud of that, and it wouldn't have been possible without our incredible volunteer team.

- Do you have a particular volunteer story that you would like to share?

- Well, gosh, there are so many about the ways that our volunteers have continued to make an impact on the ALPLM.

You know, one of my favorite volunteer stories was actually a young couple who had come to Springfield, they were big history fans, and they came to Springfield to seemingly just for a holiday.

But in fact what it was really for was to get engaged to be married.

And so they actually had their engagement here at the ALPLM, right in front of our Lincoln family.

And one of our volunteers took that photo for them, forever memorializing for that young couple their future nuptials.

And so little moments like that, I think, are so impactful.

Moments where our volunteers, you know, hop on the buses and they give our kids an overview as they're coming from school all across the State of Illinois and really throughout the region who are coming to visit here.

They give them that primer on, here are the things you need to know, here are the things that are favorites for us.

You know, our volunteers have been integral into all sorts of programming that we've done here.

It's through their stories and their connections they have made the ALPLM a much better place to be.

They are the ones who have truly made it, not just a place that a museum that survives into the present, but really a thriving and dynamic place for visitors all across the world to experience.

- Executive director Christina Shutt, thank you so much for being with us.

- Oh, gosh, thanks for coming today.

(warm orchestral music) - Special thanks to Christina Shutt and the entire staff and volunteers here at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.

Thank you for "Exploring the Heartland" with us.

For everyone at WSIU, I'm Fred Martino.

Have a great week.

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