Spring cleaning -- a little EARLY!

Things are changing around here!

Although we are hoping to raise enough money through our Capital Campaign to fund a new storage facility that will be attached to our building, we have some immediate storage needs that need to be addressed sooner than that.

For example, our hanging textile storage room was way overcrowded. This meant there was no room at all for new donations of textiles that had already been cataloged. So they were hanging in the accessions office, sort of in limbo.

I casually mentioned to Steve, our facilities manager, that I sure could use some new racks. Being the "can do" guy that he is, by the end of the day he had ordered new racks!

While I was busy doing Tea with the Curator on Monday morning, the guys cleaned out the textile storage room, moved all the clothing to the new racks, and piled up the rest of the stuff in my workspace so I could decide what to do with it.

Well, there was A LOT more there than I expected!

So this week, I have been trying to get a handle on all that STUFF. Some things were artifacts that had been out on exhibit that hadn't been put away yet. There were several hats that had been out on exhibit when the hat collection was re-housed a few years ago. So the poor things had no home box to return to. I had been trying to figure out what to do with them, because the hat collection is stored chronologically, and these hats were from all different time periods. Faced with the problem cluttering up my space, I made a quick decision to box them up together, and make a note in each database record that they would not be found in a chronological box. One thing taken care of.

But there is still a bunch more to sort through and organize. Most of it dates back before my arrival in 2001.

My work area is also currently congested with several antique vacuum cleaners that we received from Hoover. They are not Hoovers, but part of an extensive collection of vacuum cleaners collected by the company over several years. Volunteer Don Evans is cataloging them, but currently we have no place to put them in storage. Hoover also gave us lots of metal shelves, and the guys are working on installing the shelves in our storage areas. Until that project is complete, the vacuums must stay right where they are!

So, we have to do "this" before we can do "that" -- and as I keep saying, as long as we keep moving forward, at least that is in the right direction!