A Little More Cataloging Before I Start my Black Album

This morning the library, museum, and archive seasonals and interns met with the entire staff about starting work on the exhibit in the lobby of the HRC. Colleen went over the plan and schedule and let us all sign up for cases. The exhibit will be about early exploration in the Yellowstone region and the process though which it became the first national park. I will be working on a case about the years the park was run by the US Army and a case about the creation of Yellowstone Park.

Today I worked primarily on making special boxes to house a pipe and a drum used by Native Americans in ceremonies during the reintroduction of the wolves back in 1996. The men who owned these objects and used them during the wolf reintroduction donated them to the HRC in 2003.

The drum I cataloged in its new box

I finished cataloging the drum, but could not catalog or finish housing the pipe without additional information. There was a large piece of red cloth with pipe and pipe accessories and right now we aren’t sure whether the cloth was used in everyday storage or ceremony or whether it was used to wrap the pipe when it was donated to the museum. The answer to this question will determine whether we keep the cloth and how we house it. For example, there might be a stipulation that the pipe be stored in the cloth. Therefore, I will need to contact the giver in order to continue housing and cataloging the pipe.

I also emailed Katie from the Ethnology department to see if she knew any background information about a blessing wand left during a 2005 offering ceremony at the Roosevelt Arch in which Native Americans commemorated the 1999 Buffalo Walk. Currently, that is all we know about the wand, and we would like to uncover more information before cataloging it so that the catalog record will have background information and give the object context.

We got good news today about the black album project: instead of scanning each page (which takes 20-30 minutes per page), we can photograph each page with our digital camera. One of the interns, Jake, experimented with this today and determined that the resolution will be high enough in photographs. This process should save us a great deal of time. Tomorrow, I hope to start work on my black album.