Hitting the Ground Running

After two days of training, today Bridgette set us loose to work on cataloging and rehousing on our own. In the storage area, each of the museum technicians are assigned two shelves. One shelf contains objects for cataloging and the other contains objects for rehousing. Bridgette keeps the shelves stocked with objects to work on. Today, I worked on objects from my cataloging shelf and made a pretty good dent in what was there. Here is a sample of some of the objects I worked on and how I housed them:

Circa 1920 Haynes souvenir playing cards, which each feature individual photos of the park. The Haynes family is a Yellowstone legacy who published thousands of photographic postcards and prints during the early years of the park. I housed these cards in an acid free box, which I lined with ethafoam. I placed ethafoam blocks at each end to keep the cards from moving when its storage drawer is opened and closed. 

This is a stack of 50 identical Yellowstone Park Hotels stickers. The photo of the bear in the center was taken by one of the Haynes family members. The bear was rummaging in one of the many garbage dumps that were scattered across the park in the late 19th century. Bleachers were erected at many of the dumps for park visitors to get close up views of bears, who would arrive at the dumps every evening for dinner. These dumps (and other early park management practices) made many Yellowstone bears reliant on this human food source instead of hunting and gathering their own food as nature intended. 

This insignia was used by many Yellowstone companies over the years, including the Yellowstone Park Company (YPCo.), Yellowstone Park Hotel Company (YPHCo.), and Yellowstone Park Transportation Company (YPTCo.). When cataloging items with this insignia, it can get rather confusing to date these objects, as each of these companies were constantly changing their name and many used the insignia at the same time. Luckily, this one reads "Yellowstone Park Hotels" so I was able to determine a date range of 1906 - 1936 for these stickers. 

I housed these stickers in a custom made blue board box lined with thin ethafoam. I secured the stickers in a stack (as they were made) with loosely tied acid-free twill tape and stored them in a drawer with like objects. 

Here are two examples of stickers that I housed in acid-free mylar sheets for protection. I stored them in an archival box with other historic park stickers. I wrote the catalog number in pencil on the back of each sticker and also slid a section of acid-free paper into each sheet that also contains the catalog number.