Friday, November 20, 2009 Elizabeth Boyne has joined us in the lab as our newest volunteer. We have no shortage of projects. She started with cleaning and flattening newspapers from the Czech Slovak Museum but will most likely clean a collection of busts from the African American Museum and assist with cleaning and flattening manuscriptContinue reading “New Volunteer Elizabeth”
Category Archives: African American Museum of Iowa
Where We Are Now
Monday, November 16, 2009 On October 23 we sent another round of artifacts back to the African American Museum. We also sent back the first of the manuscript boxes to be cleaned. We hope to be out of Oakdale Hall by the end of the year and it is heartening to see it empty outContinue reading “Where We Are Now”
Steve Stenstrom Workshop on Shellac Finishes
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 Steve Stenstrom returned to the UI to teach us about Shellac. We learned about the properties of Shellac and the different ways to use it. Steve brought us pieces of wood to work with and we all got some experience “french polishing” which consists of a cotton pad soaked in ShellacContinue reading “Steve Stenstrom Workshop on Shellac Finishes”
inventory fun
Thursday, September 24, 2009 Keeping order in the aftermath of a disaster is not easy to do. When the flood hit Cedar Rapids in 2008 there was very little time to get everything out of the museums and things that weren’t rescued until after they had sustained flood damage were at times so unrecognizable itContinue reading “inventory fun”
Blue Boxes
Wednesday, September 9, 2009 One of our volunteers has taken on the project of building custom boxes for objects to be returned to the African American Museum in November. Beth has been teaching Kallie Holt how to make boxes from the sturdy blue corrugated board we use routinely in the conservation lab. In addition to making themContinue reading “Blue Boxes”
Adherograph Reformatting Continues
Monday, August 3, 2009 Ongoing efforts to clean and flatten flood-affected archives manuscripts from the African American Museum of Iowa have turned up yet another form of adherograph deterioration. (See June 30, 2009 entry) As seen in the example to the left, the powder medium that holds the adherograph text image has irreversibly adhered to theContinue reading “Adherograph Reformatting Continues”
Return to Sender: Reattaching Stamps
Monday, July 13, 2009 Many of the files from the African American Museum contain various forms of correspondence. There are many postcards and letters with their original stamps. When these already fragile envelopes were faced with the flood, the stamps detached to end in a pile at the bottom of the file folder. The second project IContinue reading “Return to Sender: Reattaching Stamps”
Volunteer Kallie Making a Difference
Friday, July 10, 2009 We have a new volunteer! Kallie Holt, a Junior at the University of Iowa has volunteered to work 8 hours a week here in the Conservation Lab. The first project I gave her was the cleaning of a collection of small miscellaneous items from the African American Museum. These objects rangeContinue reading “Volunteer Kallie Making a Difference”
Adherography
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 While processing manuscript archive documents from the African American Museum of Iowa we fortuned upon an old, mysterious and extremely problematic form of document duplication. What we believe we have, perhaps hundreds of, are adherography documents. A definition, found in “Guide to the identification of prints and photographs : featuring aContinue reading “Adherography”
Inventorying Flood-Affected Collections
Friday, June 26, 2009 As conservation work moves along for flood-affected artifacts from the African American Museum of Iowa, we momentarily shifted away from treatment of metals to pick up our inventory of small objects comprised of a variety of media. Two primary functions of the inventory are to verify the holdings under our care againstContinue reading “Inventorying Flood-Affected Collections”