Moving the Field Museum

I just got back from some vacation time and spent most of yesterday catching up on a ton of emails and museum-y news. As I was skimming my museum blogs, I found this link to a collection of photos from The Field Museum. (I think it was on a blog, may have been in an email... I had a lot to catch up on.)


A set up for moving exhibit cases.

The image collection is made up of 78 scans of glass plate negatives from 1920. They document the move of the Field Museum to its current location by train, auto, and horse drawn cart. It's fascinating to me to see all of the cases, with objects still inside them!, being loaded onto trains. Certainly appears to be a different method than we used earlier this year.

It's also worth peeking at the rest of the Field Museum Library's flickr stream. There are some pretty cool photos of two toed sloths, and a prehensile tailed porcupine on their front page right now. Very cool stuff. There are actually a ton of museums on Flickr, and a lot of fabulous image collections from history institutions in The Commons to explore. Check it out!

Walls and cases!

Yesterday was very exciting around here. Our mobile walls and exhibit cases were delivered!

The good folks at Museum Resources designed walls and cases to meet our needs. They drove over from Seattle yesterday in a big yellow truck filled with all kinds of exciting things.



In just a few hours, the truck was empty and the gallery was filled with, well, take a look.



That's four mobile walls (you can only see one and a half in this photo), four display pedestals, and four table cases. The case toppers are in a different corner of the gallery. The walls had to be brought in in pieces and finished in the gallery. They went from planks of wood to walls before our very eyes. It'll be a couple of weeks until we put everything together, because this is just the first delivery! The second delivery will be all the small things to make these lovely big things useful.

It's great, because now the empty gallery space is really beginning to fill up. And those walls will be great for hanging the photography exhibit we're hosting in the fall. Check out our flickr account for more photos of the delivery.