By Rebecca Helgeson, Collections Manager
December 2, 2020
Back in February, just before the statewide shut down due to the pandemic, our curatorial team discovered a large problem that needed immediate action. A volunteer brought to my attention that she noticed some plaster dust on a few objects in the exhibit area of the Old Academy Building, and that there were cracks in the ceiling above those dusty spots. I told our director, and she got an engineer in to assess the situation. As it turned out, those cracks and the dust are common in old buildings like ours and were nothing to be concerned about.
However, when the engineer was in the building, he did notice the fact that the vertical support beams that hold up the second floor were bowed. This was a big problem! We found out that we had far too much weight stored upstairs, and we needed to find a way to significantly reduce the amount of stuff on the second floor. We were told that it wasn’t an emergency, but we needed to take action fast.
The first thing we did was remove as much weight from the center of the second floor as we possibly could. At the time of this discovery, the second floor was filled with an exhibition that is usually included in our third-grade school program and a make-shift room that had been built to separate Special Collections objects and archives from the rest of the space. We packed away the objects in the exhibit in archival boxes, and the display cases were removed. Next, the walls of the Special Collections room were dismantled, and the shelving units were placed up against the building’s external walls. Finally, movers came and relocated objects and furniture to the basements at both the Academy and Edgell Memorial Library.
While this was an unexpected crisis followed by our collective unexpected crisis, we were able to take advantage of this problem as the opportunity that it actually is. Our collection was in desperate need of being inventoried and sorted. Until now, FHC’s permanent collection has been sorted primarily by subject matter. This system was a throwback to the days before digital databases, since sorting by subject makes it easy to find an object or archival material that you need as it relates to a specific topic. The trouble with this system is that it isn’t the best way to store objects if your goal is to maintain their longevity. Different materials can have adverse effects on other materials (for example, acidic paper can discolor a variety of materials if kept in contact for long periods of time), so it is best to sort objects by what materials they are made from. Also, an object can fall under a number of different subjects – a sword can relate to a person, a specific war or battle, and the general subject of “arms” itself, so what subject it would be filed under would depend on what an individual thought best suited the object. With current technology, it is better to have accurate location information for each object entered in a searchable database so that anyone can find whatever they’re looking for regardless of why they are looking for that object.
Since we are now handling and moving every object in the Academy to make sure our institution is safe for visitors, volunteers, and staff, we have decided to take advantage of this situation to perform an inventory and properly sort our objects. With the help of our collections’ volunteers, we have already made significant progress with this project. We’re even discovering that there are additional benefits to performing these tasks, but that’s a topic for another day.
To be continued…
