A Mammoth Undertaking

Yes, we are milking that pun for all it's worth. And maybe more...

In any case, we've gone a little mammoth crazy around here. If you're not local, you may not have heard about the Wenas Creek Mammoth, which was discovered a few years ago about 35 miles south of campus. It's kind of a big deal. Several large bones have been unearthed, including a humerus, femur and vertebrae. The project was even featured in the History Channel's Journey to 10,000 BC (the only link on the History Channel website seems to be to their video shop - but at least it has a description).

And now, the Wenas Creek Mammoth project will be our inaugural exhibit of our Window on Central series, small exhibits which showcase work being done on and around campus. The exhibit itself will be featured in our hallway facing corner display case, but a mammoth calls for something a little more... dramatic. Like a full size mammoth in the lobby.



And how does one create a full size mammoth? In this case, interim museum director Bill Wood enlarged and refined artist's Carl Buell's rendering of the mammoth and separated it into sections we can print with our 24" plotter. Once printed, the strips were cut down to fit on pieces of foam core and then glued to the foam core. Then we reassembled the whole thing on the lobby wall. No small project!

We started near the front and worked out.


Bill Wood places the final tusk piece.


When it was all done, we put together this little video of the process.


Definitely a lot of fun, and a very cool thing to have in the lobby.

We've arrived

College of the Sciences Dean Kirk Johnson and CWU Trustee Patricia Notter cut the ribbon.

The Museum of Culture and Environment at Central Washington University is officially open. When I began this blog more than two years ago, the museum didn't even have an official name. It didn't have a gallery. It didn't have a webpage. What it had was the dedication of some volunteers and an academic department, 35 years of history, and one new full time employee.

We've come a long way in these two years.

Guests view the exhibit for the first time.

We opened on September 25th, 2009 with a crowd of nearly 200 people touring the gallery (Link to Facebook photo album.). The opening exhibit, River of Memory: The Everlasting Columbia, on loan from the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center, has been really an excellent first exhibit for us. It truly combines the themes of culture and the environment by exploring the history of a river that people have impacted for thousands of years. The Museum even added a small component to the exhibit, showing some of our net weights and talking about fishing on the Columbia.

Net sinkers and anchor weights on display.

We've come so far in just a couple of years, but we have farther to go yet.

In the meantime, I hope to get back to talking about collections work on a regular basis soon here. And I hope you can come visit us! River of Memory runs through December 17th. We're open Wednesday through Friday 2 to 6 pm and Saturday 10 am to 3 pm. Parking is free on campus after 4:30 pm on weekdays and all day Saturday.

September?

In my mind, September has always been the end of the summer. I think it has to do with spending so many years in school, and now working for a university. But the grass in the arboretum is still green and various individuals are out there enjoying it. Like this guy:


He's an African tortoise from the Biology department and lives in the Science Building, next door to our building. He was out today, getting some air and nomming some apples.

But I spend most of my time inside. Yesterday we were playing with the gallery furniture, testing out various arrangements in preparation for our opening exhibit. The mobile walls are really versatile! It was amazing to see the different ways in which our (more or less) rectangular gallery can be set up with the walls. Here's one view:


It's really astounding to think of how far we've come since we started this blog nearly two years ago (wow! has it been that long already?). I'm really looking forward to seeing the exhibit up in the space. I think it's going to be really great.

New Dean Hall Neighbors

I learned this week that Dean Hall has some residents without offices. Whooo whooo can it be?


Do you see them? It's a couple of Great Horned Owls (I think). They've decided that those, um, architectural features over the windows are just about the best place to be. What's really neat is that, from the third floor stairwell landing, you're pretty much at eye level with them.



It's kind of appropriate that these great birds would choose to spend their days on the building that houses the Museum of Culture and Environment - this intersection of human modification of the landscape with the needs of wildlife is right up our alley.

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.

Coming together

As the (fiscal) year comes to a close, we're seeing a flurry of activity around the museum. The big news today? We have a sign and a docent station.

The sign went up yesterday afternoon. The sign guys have been putting up all kinds of signs around the building, but this is one of the bigger ones. They laid it all out on the gallery first to make a template.


It really helps to identify the museum. No more confusion about that big gallery in Dean Hall!


And just this morning we walked into the gallery and discovered that our docent/greeter station had been delivered. Modeled on a version in a catalog and constructed by the fine folks at CWU facilities, it looks great, and is versatile.


That's Angie behind the desk. Angie's here for the summer, and hopefully beyond, working on programming for this fall and the next school year or two. She and I had great fun playing with the new docent station. It's in two parts, so there are some options. Angie and I like this set up better; it certainly gives the person behind the desk more room to move around.


Everything is coming together now. We'll really be ready for our first exhibit this fall.

Finals week!

It's finals week here at CWU and a lot of things are getting wrapped up around the museum.

The gallery lights have been replaced!

The security is being installed!

The collections are all unpacked!

The docent station (for the lobby) is almost finished!

There's a couch in the museum office (for visitors!)!

Walls and cases are being built!

We've signed the contract on our opening exhibit!

The corner display case has been built out so we can display things in it!

It's been a pretty productive week or two, I'd say. But with all of these awesome developments come some other final things. Four of the interns who've worked with me all year are graduating and moving on to bigger and better things. Thank you, Kim, Launi, Rachel, and Shena, for all of your excellent work with the collection this year. Best of luck in all of your future endeavors.

Getting ready

We'll be hosting our very first exhibit this September, and work is underway to make the gallery ready for it.

The gallery doors are being rehung and made more secure.


An unneeded door is being removed - this means more wall space inside the gallery!



The lights are being changed out for more object friendly lights (the ones hanging there are the old kind).


And the boxes are all unpacked and ready to be hauled away!


All of these projects are still underway and should be completed before the end of June. It's very exciting!

Done!

It is done.

The collections move, that is. We completed the move between March 21 and March 25th. It took maybe 3 days all told. I didn't take many photos; I was too busy lifting lots and lots of boxes. But here's how it went down:

First, we identified which boxes we were going to pack. Then we checked them off of the master box list and loaded them into the van.

Then I drove very carefully to the new location, backing up to the museum loading dock. Believe you me, I got pretty darn good at backing up the full sized van we used. We then unloaded the boxes onto tables in the workroom. We would do a couple of loads of boxes before the tables were full and ready for the next step.

From the tables, the boxes were transferred to shelves in the compactor unit, based on what they contained. Both the master box list and the packing list on the outside of each box indicated where the box should go. As we placed each box on a shelf, we marked the shelf on the master box list. And pretty soon, we had moved a lot of boxes.

There were a few objects which were too large to pack in boxes. These objects were moved individually and placed on shelves - no need to unpack what hasn't been packed!

And, finally, after all the boxes that could go in the compactors were put in the compactors, we moved the oversized boxes into the storage room, where they are still hanging out today.

So far, nothing has been unpacked. There are four reasons for this: 1) after the move was completed, I hied it out of here for an extended weekend and some rest, 2) I've had to unpack all the supplies, files, and miscellany from the old office and workspace into the new office and workspace, 3) we're going to need to cut many many shelf liners for some of the objects to rest on (the liners provide a surface with more friction than the metal shelves), and, most importantly, 4) the objects in the boxes are now in a much different environment than they have been for the past decade or more and need time to adjust to their surrounding. The cardboard box provides a bit of a buffer to the environmental change, allowing a slower adjustment rather than shock treatment. Think of the difference between easing yourself into a cool swimming pool and diving in.

But we'll be unpacking soon enough. As soon as the chaos in the office is cleared up...

Sure signs of spring

Spring is springing. There are signs of it all around. The birds are singing, the snow is melting on the hills, and flowers are poking their heads out of the ground (or the landscaping crew has started their work, anyway).

The packing is going well! We're just over 2 weeks out from the move, so this is the final push. Yesterday morning, intern Kim and I tackled packing the large New Guinea shields. We secured three shields at a time to cardboard and placed them in mattress boxes. Here's Kim lining the bottom of the boxes with foam, and a rare sighting of the collections manager in the wild (that's me with my back turned):

We have the world collections room almost entirely packed at this point, except for some very large pieces and some masks which are being researched by the curation and collections management course. We've taken out the shelves and are storing the boxes in the resulting spaces.

A lot more work needs to be done in the Native American collections room. The objects there are generally less complex, and the interns and I have a lot more practice, so I'm confident that we can get this done in the next two weeks. We've a running start, having packed the lithics, and now have the beading and much of the southwestern pottery packed.

I've been working toward this move for so long, it's amazing to think it's almost here! We've even started unpacking some of the lithics into the new Dean Hall space, which is very very exciting. We unpacked 23 boxes yesterday. That was especially good, since we need those boxes back here to pack more!

And, by the by, this is the 100th post! Confetti! Streamers! Balloons! Cake! Thanks for reading everyone!

Packing Update 2/13/2009

Wow! We're already halfway through the month of February. That puts us about 5 weeks out from the collections move. That's pretty wild. Thankfully, the intrepid interns are making excellent progress in packing. Just look at all that empty shelf space:

And the boxes are really beginning to pile up.


I would say that this room is about 2/5 to 1/2 packed. The other room has only had its lithics packed. But, as usual, I think we're making pretty good progress and will be on schedule for the move. Fingers crossed!

Lithics Move Complete!

At 10 am Saturday I met three brave interns in my office. We were about to embark on an epic journey: moving the lithics collection. For our purpose, we include in lithics the chipped stone (arrowheads, scrapers, and flakes), ground stone (manos, metates, pestles) and natural history pieces (selected fossils and geological specimens). All totaled, we had about 7000 pieces of rock to move.

And we did it in two and a half hours.

The move went very smoothly and now the compactor storage has something in it.


Most of the 7000 pieces were in the form of very small and relatively light chipped stone. Despite the small size of each piece, all 7000 take up a goodly amount of space.


The most difficult pieces to move were the very large metates. In particular the piece in the bottom left of the photo below - it took three of us to lift it 5 inches onto the flat dolly. I am not sure that it will be moving again anytime soon. Most of the rest of the material we moved will be unpacked into drawers in the compactor across the aisle from them.


And yesterday the freezer for the isolation room was delivered! It's very large and has hanging baskets just inside the top. It's also lockable to prevent small children from crawling in... or maybe for security purposes.


We're making progress!

Packing Update 1/30/2009

We're shifting into full gear here at the Collections Department as we finish up various projects and move into packing full time. My dedicated interns have been hard at work. They're finishing up the photography of the collection (so we have a visual record of our objects):

You can see our high tech photo background above. Another intern is working on creating surfaces so we can move delicate objects like this Bear mask safely.

The cedar bark used for the mane is extremely fragile and small losses occur whenever it is picked up. The board minimizes the need to handle the mask directly and keeps any lost bark with the mask. Other masks have many fragile parts which need to be stabilized as much as possible (so the vibrations during movement don't cause damage):

And in the midst of this, we're still packing. And we have the gaps in the storage to prove it!

That's the former home of about 6000 pieces of chipped stone. Now all tidily shrink wrapped and ready to head over to Dean Hall. And our box stack keeps growing and growing. (This is one of three box stacks - don't let it deceive you.)

Packing update 1/23/2009

What a week! The United States inaugurated a new President and we packed over 7000 objects.

Okay. They were chipped stone artifacts (projectile points, scrapers, flakes) and we're not exactly done packing yet.

In order to make the move easier on all, we'll be transporting the lithics in the drawers they are in now. Some of my intrepid interns took on the task of counting all the lithics, so that there is a current account of how many pieces are in each drawer. We'll wrap the drawers in shrink wrap to prevent any stray lithics from falling out in transport, and call it good.

We have, so far, 18 boxes (real cardboard boxes) packed with larger, heavier groundstone lithics. We're running out of places to squirrel them away, so we're beginning to stack them.


But my view has been less exciting:

I'm making sure that all the information we write on the packing sheets is entered into the database, and then the object locations are updated in the database, so that we have an accurate accounting of all of our objects, even as they are packed in boxes.

It's a pretty good running start, but we've got a lot of work to do in the weeks ahead of us.

Packing Rocks!

I will never get past that pun. Anything to do with lithics will probably be accompanied by a terrible pun. I apologize.

We've packed seven boxes so far, 83 objects. It's a start on this collection of 9000+. Six of those boxes (51 objects) are lithics, primarily groundstone tools. Borrowing a method from the National Museum of the American Indian Move Manual (which the good folks at NMAI were willing to send me), I have been packing lithics with the wave method.

This method stops the lithics from rolling against each other during moving, and also immobilizes them without causing crushing. It's good for very stable objects like these pestles.

After a box is full, and with one layer only seeing as lithics can be quite heavy, it is taped shut and the packing list is attached. This way we can see at a glance how many objects are in the box and where it should go. The blank part of the form at the bottom will be filled out as the box is unpacked in the new space.

But in the meantime, the boxes are in temporary storage in the collections room. We'll be doing a test move of the lithics (as they are more stable in changing temperatures) in a month or so to work the bugs out of the move system prior to the full move over spring break. So until then, I'll be packing rocks!