Door to Door: A Collecting Trip

The Manitoba Museum recently acquired a number of objects that add to an existing collection. The Wilson family collection of bottles and crocks is an extensive one, with over 1600 artefacts.  The Wilsons contacted the Museum with an offer to donate a related collection of ceramic footwarmers and various Medalta ware. Curator Roland Sawatzky recommended we accept the offered items; the subject went to our Collection Committee, which approved it on the curator’s recommendation. Follow us now through the process of preparing for and completing the acquisition.

 Preparation

We had been provided a list of items. Knowing the number was roughly 150, with 49 of those being ceramic footwarmers, I collected 35 “Banker’s box” size boxes. An intern, Megan Narvey, cut pieces of foam for packing and placed them in every box. She also cut up some extra bubble wrap for packing.

 Pickup

Three people were involved in the pickup: Curator Andrea Dyck (Contemporary Cultures and Immigration), acting for Roland, who was undertaking fieldwork; Nancy Anderson, Collections Assistant, Human History; and Megan Narvey, Collections and Conservation intern. We rented a minivan, and all the boxes fit into the back. Arriving at the donor’s house, the empty boxes were brought in, and packing proceeded. Luckily, all the objects were stored on shelves in one area in the basement, which made packing faster. The boxes were then loaded into the van, and staff returned to the Museum. The Deed of Gift forms had been signed at the house, so the objects were legally ours to take.

Footwarmers packed in box

Unloading and Unpacking

The boxes were put onto carts and brought into the Museum, into the elevator and up to the sixth floor History Lab. 

Here is the Medalta ware unpacked in the History lab

The footwarmers in the lab

Next Steps

With all items removed from boxes, the next step is to process them. Each must be assigned a catalogue number and entered into the collection database. They also must be physically numbered, catalogued, photographed and condition reported, before being put into their permanent storage location.

More than meets the eye

The actual collection trip took approximately a half day. However, the preparation took about the same amount of time, and the next steps will be far more time-consuming. With cataloguing and condition reporting, many entries can be cut and pasted, and the conservators can use a checklist to speed the process; however, I still anticipate that the processing of these 150 or so objects will take person-hours adding up to weeks of work!

Unless you work in a museum, most likely you have no idea of the details involved in collections work. The steps I’ve described are required for all new acquisitions. This is a glimpse into the day to day tasks the Collections and Conservation department staff tackle, although it’s just one part of what we do.

The Mineral Exhibit

If you visit this page occasionally and have been wondering about when the next blog post would be forthcoming, well, I had been wondering that too. I have begun new posts several times, but in each instance my focus has been pulled away by the same all-consuming activity: my time has been taken up by the completion of a mineral exhibit. This past week, we finally did the installation, so I thought I had might as well set those posts-in-progress aside yet again. Here, instead, are some photos of the exhibit.

At the Museum we had long recognized that a mineral exhibit was one of the features most lacking in the Earth History Gallery. Minerals are the basic building blocks of rocks and other geological materials, we have a great diversity of minerals in this province’s rocks, and of course minerals are often beautiful objects that are treasured by many collectors.

For the past several years we have been collaborating with the Mineral Society of Manitoba to acquire specimens suitable for exhibit, and The Manitoba Museum Foundation and the Canadian Geological Foundation had kindly provided us with funding to construct cases. This exhibit is at the front end of the Earth History Gallery, where we only had space for a couple of cases, and the number of specimens and volume of text were quite limited, so this should have been a simple little exhibit project, no?

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Tell Me A Story

Recently, I was able to travel to New York City to visit museums in Manhattan to research how immigration history is being presented at other museums.  I was interested in three in particular: the Ellis Island Immigration Museum (http://www.nps.gov/elis/index.htm), the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (http://www.tenement.org/), and the Museum of Chinese in America (http://www.mocanyc.org/).  Each of these museums focuses on a different element of immigration history and approaches the subject in very unique ways.  They are also vastly different in their focus and scope, from the Museum of Chinese in America, whose mandate it is to present the history of one particular ethnic group, to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, which seeks to share the story of Ellis Island and the millions of immigrants of all backgrounds who came through its gates.

The Ellis Island Immigration Museum is housed in the main building on Ellis Island.  This was the most active immigrant processing station in the United States, from its opening in 1892 to when it was abandoned in 1954.  During this period, it welcomed and processed over 12 million immigrants.  In 1965, the site was incorporated into the Statue of Liberty Monument and made a National Parks Service site; however, it was only in 1986, with the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, that work at the main building on Ellis Island began and restored it to its appearance in the years 1918-1924.  The Ellis Island Immigration Museum officially opened in the main building in 1990.

As in many other museums housed in historical buildings, part of the enjoyment of being there is the experience of walking the same steps and being within the same walls that held so much history.  Ellis Island is a grand experience, from the expansive Baggage Room on the ground floor to the soaring ceilings in the Registry Room on the third.

Continue reading HERE