Baskets and How We Store Them

This last academic quarter I had the opportunity to teach a class in the Museum Studies program here at Central Washington University. While I work with students as interns all the time, teaching a class was a whole new experience. I had the privilege of teaching a course on Registration and Collections Management, which is what I do every day!

My goal for the course was to teach the students practical fundamentals, and what better way to do that than with hands on projects? The basket collection was an immediate candidate. The baskets are beautiful and likely to be handled frequently for exhibit and research. The students were tasked with a four part assignment: Complete a catalog form, a condition report, rehouse and support the basket, and enter the information they gathered into the museum database.


The rehoused baskets on carts.

All students were required to make a custom sized box from archival cardboard and support the basket if necessary. Many of the baskets chosen for the project are wide, shallow baskets for which we needed to construct supports to help prevent the sides from slumping. Gravity is a mighty foe which must be fought with….

…custom carved blocks of ethafoam.

Carving foam to match the curve of a basket proved to be a very tricky proposition, but the students were up to the task. Not all baskets required such specific mounts. Some were fine without external supports.


This flat bottomed basket is very stable as it is. A handling tray lined with ethafoam prevents sliding and accidental bumping into other baskets on shelves.


This unique piece was too nearly flat for the sort of carved supports which worked best for other items, but small bumpers made of ethafoam tube cut length wise was just about perfect for supporting the basket and preventing movement in the box.
Some pieces, however, proved too difficult to build a mount for in the limited class time dedicated to the project and stop-gap measures were put in place.


The ring at the base of this basket prevents the basket from shifting in the box and more equally distributes the stress at the base, but does nothing to alleviate warping that may already be occurring due to gravity. This basket will receive further attention before going back into storage.

Through this assignment, 16 baskets from the collection were thoroughly documented and now have housing which will protect them for years to come. Additionally, 16 museum studies students now have the experience of creating a custom storage mount for important museum objects. I declare that to be a success all around.

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!

Unpacking nears completion

We're just boxes away from being completely, totally, utterly unpacked from the move. How to best prove this claim? How about some photos of used up packing material?

Bags of used up packing foam


Unpacked and reflattened boxes.

The foam is being sorted and we're saving much of it for reuse in future (non-permanent) packing. The boxes are going back to the University which will reuse them or recycle them as needed. Which is good. Right now the cardboard has overrun at least two of our work tables!

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...

It's the Final Countdown!

Well, less space travel, more short distance travel in a minivan.

But yes! It is the final countdown to moving here in the collections department. Everything that can be packed is packed, with the exception of my desk, which I plan to deal with at the exact last minute. But the rest of the office is packed:



The storage rooms are all set to go. The interns finished packing on the very last day of their internships. Perfect timing!
Native American room:

World room:


This week I've been getting the new space ready for the move, unpacking the last of the lithics that we moved last month, and doing the paperwork to make sure everything is cleanly and clearly documented for the move. Today I plan to do some more data entry/paperwork and vacuum the tracks of the compactor storage (a surprising amount of debris accumulates in those!). And I plan to make triply sure that we are ready to move come Moving Day. Truly, we're in the final countdown.

Packing the baskets

Now that we're mostly done packing the World room, we've moved on to the Native American collection. This means that we are packing many, many baskets. I thought I would give you a run down on the packing process.

The first thing to do is assemble a box, choosing the large or small size of box depending on what you're packing. Then find the next box number (we're up to box 225) and write it on the box in three place and on the packing list. Then, to be brief, put some stuff in the box. Make sure the stuff isn't going to shift when moved, and isn't being crushed. This usually results in a box looking like this:

or this:

Those objects are being surrounded by packing foam with a buffer layer of either tyvek or archival tissue paper. This method of packing ensures that objects are safe against the box tilting and minor vibration. What it does not ensure against is the box falling or being placed upside down. We will be relying on constant vigilance to ensure that nothing ends up upside down.

Each object in the box is listed on the packing list. The packing list is then entered into a master spreadsheet and each object's temporary location is updated in the PastPerfect database (ie "Object packed in Box 215 for the move to Dean Hall"). Once this step is complete and no errors have been found, the boxes are closed, the packing list is slipped into an adhesive envelope and stuck to the box where it will stay until the box is unpacked sometime this spring. So the final box looks like Box 191 in this photo.


And after that... the boxes are stacked in corners and shelving columns until moving day! And moving day is coming up fast. Two weeks from today!

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!

Box building time

It's busy busy busy here at the nascent Museum of Culture and Environment. Lots going on and lots in the pipeline. But today I am going to build some boxes and house some objects. First on the list: Russian religious icons.


Image on a wooden backing, with a copper overlay. The back is covered with an orange velvet. The velvet and the relatively small size of this icon suggest to me that this might be the sort of icon that one carried along during one's travels. There are five Russian religious icons in the collection; each one has its own specific needs for storage. So off I go!

Supplies!

The museum recently got a shipment of supplies! Okay, maybe this isn't really that exciting to most people, but I am the kind of person who checks the mail as soon as it comes and still gets excited by a package in the mail. So imagine my delight when my most recent supply orders started arriving in great big boxes like this:


Inside, were all kinds of goodies. I got a whole bunch of 2" ethafoam planks, which are great for carving out custom cavities to hold an object very securely. I did this with many of the bone and ivory pieces we have from Alaska.


And a bunch of foam rod which is possibly the most whimsical looking of the museum supplies we have on hand. There's about 100' of it in this picture. It's great for making pot rings (.pdf) (although I've been hot gluing the foam instead of trying out NMAI's "hot dog" method) and has many other potential uses as well.


And last but not least is the sticky subject of adhesives (get it?! Sticky adhesives! I crack me up.). Adhesives in a museum setting are problematic though - a truly archival adhesive (one which will not break down over time) may never exist, but adhesives have their place and are very, very useful. Last time I ordered super long glue sticks, but this time around we're going to try their shorter counterparts. That roll in front is double stick tape which has a myriad of uses. The museum clamping devices (cough *clothes pins* cough) in the background are not from any of the most recent packages - they are from the local drug store; they're used to keep 2 pieces of glued material from pulling apart. Simple, but it works!


The packages included a few other things, but I'm excited to have the foam rod (which we didn't have earlier) and to get some more glue sticks (which we were very nearly out of) and some double stick tape (which we were out of). It's good to get supplies.

These boots were made for walking....

but now they're in a museum so no one is allowed to use them for walking, running, dancing, or even hanging out on the couch watching tv. And they're not boots, really, they're moccasins.

Over the past couple weeks I spent some time rehousing the moccasin collection. We have 17.5 pairs of moccasins, ranging from so tiny that they must be for a doll to mens sizes, and 1 pair of child's mukluks. Some of them were pretty much flat after being in storage for years (you know how a light canvas sneaker flops over? It's kind of like that. Shoes don't always hold their shape.), while others had some paper stuffing which gave them some support.

None had storage which allowed easy lifting while minimizing physical contact. So, taking a page from the Minnestoa Historical Society (which has really excellent information on their website, by the way), I set out to make custom supports for the moccasins, both internal and external.

I started with the moccasins, like this one. It had no internal support, although the large amount of beading held the shape of the foot fairly effectively.


Then I looked at what I had on hand: Cotton stockinette fabric, polyester quilt batting, scissors, and a sewing kit. The scissors, by the way, are distressingly dull. Must remember to sharpen those sometime.


For my first try, I made a rectangular pillow:


Okay, so it was approximately rectangular. I'm a collections manager, not a seamstress. But look how nicely it supports the back of the moccasin:


But, it occurred to me, feet are not rectangular. So the rest of the moccasin support inserts were made to be roughly foot shaped. Again, I emphasize roughly.


And check out the sole of the shoe above. Looks like it was recycled from a parfleche, or some other similarly decorated object.

And finally, after sewing 33 supports, all the moccasins were supported. I endeavored to recreate the external support which the MHS had utilized, and, ultimately, I think it worked out pretty well. Ours are made of acid free card board with a tissue paper layer on which the moccasins sit (because the cardboard is buffered and the tissue paper is not).






The freshly housed moccasins were returned to their wooden drawers where they will patiently await the move to a new facility.


Ultimately, this kind of storage will reduce the need for handling the moccasins which will help preserve them for a longer time. Feels like a happy ending to me!

Progress Report

This week is Spring Break for Central Washington University. That means that it is extremely quiet in the building, which normal bustles with undergraduates during daytime hours. The quiet has given me a chance to take stock of progress. But first, a progress shot of our future museum home:



The Dean Hall renovation is progressing! The bottom floor walls have been moved out - I can see framing for them around - and the front of the building is being added on to. Dean Hall will house more than the museum; it will also be home to the Dean of the College of the Sciences, the Geography Department, the Anthropology Department, and several large classrooms. But it's exciting to see progress being made.

Progress is being made inside the museum as well. I had three hard working interns helping me this quarter. They worked on a variety of tasks including cataloging, rehousing, photographing, and updating the PastPerfect records for nearly 250 of our collections objects. Receiving special attention was our collection of West African material, including many pieces of jewelry, our collection of spears, arrows, and bows, and our collection of Southwest Pottery. I cannot thank these interns enough for their hard work, and am grateful that two will be returning for the Spring Quarter.




In addition, Anthropology 362: Curation and Collections Management researched our small collection of Navajo weavings and rehoused them. Previously, these textiles had been half-rolled, half-folded, but now they are rolled and hung on our impromptu textile storage rack.


So we've made some really excellent progress this quarter, and I think we're going to make some really excellent progress next quarter. We've come a long way, but there's a great deal more work to be done.