Today, Erica and I worked on rehousing several dozen decorative spoons that had been stored in a number of separate drawers. A new drawer had recently been dedicated to spoon housing, and we were responsible for moving the rest of the spoons into the newly dedicated spoon drawer to open up more space to put away objects we will be cataloging and rehousing throughout the summer. This would have been relatively easy if the spoons had been labeled clearly when they were originally cataloged. However, many of the labels were illegible so we had to either decipher them and re-label them appropriately.
Deciphering the catalog numbers was a matter of trail and error in ANCS+, filling in the numbers around the legible numbers on the unreadable spoons until the correct object came up on the screen. Thankfully, the spoons had been photographed when they were originally catalogued, so we were able to match photos with the objects we were looking up. This exercise made me really appreciate all the object photos we have been taking as we catalog. Without them in this instance it would have been incredibly difficult to uncover the catalog numbers for these spoons.
We finished the spoon rehousing project in the early afternoon. Afterwards, I worked on cataloging objects from my shelf of items to be cataloged. One interesting object I worked on was a wooden pipe with a carved buffalo attached to the top of it. I think the buffalo shaped area served some function, but I can’t say for sure. I housed the flute on a flat piece of blue board, poked holes in the board on either side of the flute in three places, threaded twill tape through the holes, and tied the flute onto the board with the tape. I also glued blocks of ethafoam to the blue board to secure the two ends of the flute and made handles for the blue board out of cotton tape to make it easy to pick up the tray.
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