This week saw the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums (MAAM) meeting in Philadelphia. On Sunday our facilities manager Stacey Hendricks talked about our 2008 gallery relighting project as part of a panel and on Wednesday the Rosenbach were lucky enough to be a project site for the White Gloves Gang, organized by the Registrars Committee of MAAM.
The White Gloves Gang are volunteers who undertake a day of collections-project work in the conference host city. Karen Schoenewaldt, our registrar, put our six Gang volunteers to work rehousing phonograph records from the Marianne Moore collection and rehousing and integrating our newspaper collection. I am especially excited about the newspaper project, since I have been using that collection heavily in preparing for our Civil War 150 exhibitions and programs and the rehousing will not only help protect the newspapers, but will also make them easier to locate and access. Archival supplies (mylar sleeves, acid-free folders, etc.) were generously donated by Gaylord, University Products, and Conservation Resources and financial support came from Willis Fine Art and Crozier Fine Art.
So a big thank you to all our volunteers–Batja Bell, Jobi Zink, Andy Deock, Kirsten Wise, Floss Izzo, and Derek Jones–and to all the in-house staff (especially Karen Schoenewaldt and Elizabeth Fuller) who made this productive day possible. Here are a few pictures of the Gang in action.
Making acid-free folders–those newspapers are big.
The Gang at work–this gives you a sense of the size of the project.
Our hard-working registrar, hard at work with some Moore records.
No actual white gloves (they might snag on the paper)–but definitely handling with care.