Some real work at the museum

What’s the high tech way of flattening old paper?

First you take a trash can and put an upside down flower pot in it. Then pour a gallon or two of hot warm around it. Next you take two square pieces of foam board and put them on top of the upside trash can so that all 8 vertexes are not aligned up. Finally, you put the wrinkled, curled, warped paper on top of the foam board and then put the lid of the trash can on. Leave this for 24 hours. The next day, you carefully place your now damp paper between some heavy sheets of paper then place heavy books on top of that. Leave this for a week!

How about describing a collection?

You’re given an archival file box with a bunch of unmarked folders in it and eighteen documents inside. You look through the study aid book to get an idea of how to write up a new temporary study inventory. Carefully, you go through the documents and describe them as correspondents, newspaper, reports, printed material, etc. Then you decide the inclusive and bulk dates of the materials. Inclusive is the earliest to the newest while bulk is the primary years the documents were created between. Next you write up a short description of what these documents are about and then you decide on a filing system and then describe what is going in which folder under what heading (e.g. correspondents, printed material, etc.).

Then as you are filling out the folder labels, you find some more documents between the pages of a book. You go back to square one. As you read the obituary of the person whose documents you have, you realize that the stuff between the pages of the book probably belonged to their younger brother. Cue the mystery springing to life.

Somewhere in-between, you get teary eyed looking at the obituary at these two brothers (21 and 26) who died in 1943. Neither of their bodies ever made it home. The younger was the navigator in a plane flying over the Romania Oil Fields in May. A bomb came through the nose of the plane where he was. It was his very first mission. The older brother was flying solo over Austria when his plane was shot down. He survived with internal injuries but later died after surgery at a hospital. A madame French political prisoner cared for him till the end, wrote his wife, and then cared for his grave until she was able to go home.

I asked my museum boss how do you handle holding the very few objects that remain of these boys? This piece that shows they one had gotten bored during lecture and had started doodling on his confidential manual about radiotelescopes? She simply said, “I study the Civil War.” Her people are long dead but if it had not been for the war, these boys could have been still alive.

Archival work is hard.