A Very Busy Day at the HRC

This morning, a very large group came to the HRC for a tour of the facility. Because the group was so big, we had to split them into two smaller groups and bring them through the museum separately. Alicia gave the tour, but asked that the seasonals and interns join the group to make sure no one touched anything or wandered away from the tour into the other areas of storage. Unlike many tour groups we have had, this group was very inquisitive and that made the tour take much longer than usual. By the time both groups had toured the museum, half the morning was over!

After the tour and into the afternoon, I catalogued four hand-tinted and two black and white Haynes large format panoramic prints. Describing all six landscape scenes in the database was tedious, but the prints themselves were really neat. Hand-tinting was a popular process before the advent of color processing, and the result looks a lot like watercolors.

One of the black and white Haynes Prints

One of the hand-tinted Haynes prints

I housed the prints in large acid free map folders, which I labeled on the outside corner and placed in a map drawer for storage. One of the two black and white prints were scenes of Mammoth at the turn of the century. I was able to date the print because of context clues within the picture. Basically, I looked at the buildings in the print and then looked up the dates that they were built and torn down when applicable. This allowed me to narrow down the date the picture was taken to a narrow range of years.

I used a similar process for the other black and white photo of the Old Faithful Inn. The inn has changed over the years due to additions and renovations. One of the most noticeable changes is the number of finials (flagpoles) on top of the inn. When it was built, there were eight finials, but today there are only four remaining because of structural changes to the hotel. In the photo, there were eight finials, so I was able to determine that the photo was taken before the first renovation. I think it’s really fun to find the clues within the objects to date them!

Because me and Bridgette have the same birthday, we all went out to lunch on Wednesday to celebrate. Colleen was nice enough to treat me and Bridgette and it was fun to hang out with the library and archives people during the workday (usually, we don’t see each other because we work on different floors).

Then, I continued working on the metal rehousing project for the rest of the afternoon. I finished putting all the pieces into corrosion intercept bags, labeling the bags, and putting them into boxes. All I have left to do is change the location of all the objects in ANCS+ and put the boxes into upright shelving.