Hello bloggers! Welcome to another addition of INVENTORY! As mundane as it sounds, its actually not as bad as it appears. This, I think, has to do with 1. I have only been doing this for a few months, and 2. I keep getting interrupted to do other tasks! So, while 8 hours doing inventory may seem like a lot, there are plenty of other fun, exciting things that I am doing in between actual “inventory” time.
For example: Did you know that they save each pen that President Clinton used when signing something into law? I sure didn’t! Many of these pens do get donated to friends or relatives, but we received a large package of them the other day. This means we need to go through the process of bringing them into our collection, or cataloging them. They are measured, analyzed and detailed and this information is put into the computer. Then we take a picture of them, package them up, and put them in their new home. This can take anywhere from one day to what seems like forever…but its a fun, step by step process. Stephanie has been helping me with this, so I have a buddy to tell jokes to.
I do love working with artifacts and actual items, so this isn’t without its thrills when we find a particularly interested item – like when we helped find purses for the new purse museum exhibit that is coming out downtown.
Sometime inventory is more than just taking items that are brought to the Library and cataloging them. We are also in the middle of our 10 year re-inventory plan, where we need to go through each object and verify that they are indeed what they say they are, that they are still in good order (or not!), and we also change their curatorial priority if need be. Curatorial priority is the significance of the item on a scale of 1-5, 1 being we want to start pulling the item out of our collection and 5 we would like to keep. (Its the difference between a regular pen that was donated from a Clinton fan, to a pen that was used by President Clinton himself.) We also need to reorganize the entire storage, since most of the items during the first inventory were just thrown haphazardly wherever they landed with not particular reason. Lastly, we need to take pictures of everything! Whew!
Keep checking back here for museum updates! It’s a wonderful world!
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