This week, John and I tackled a large inventory project at Eckley. Some folks from Collections Management at the State Museum in Harrisburg, PA came up to inventory a significant number of artifacts being stored in a house on-site. From Monday to part of Wednesday, we meticulously went through each and every shelf (of which there are dozens, loaded to the brim with objects) ensuring everything was accurately accounted for. On Thursday, I spent my time familiarizing myself with online-published oral histories of Eckley, as well as taking proper photographs of the same two artifacts I catalogued last week.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The inventorying process was not necessarily difficult, but it was time consuming. We broke up into two teams, and each covered one half of the house. One person would be on a spreadsheet with internal artifact info to check records of everything we saw, while the other(s) would read off accession (internal identification, essentially) numbers of each and every artifact. Often, we had to provide better descriptions than what already existed or simply provide entirely new descriptions and pictures for artifacts that were either not catalogued, or improperly so. Many artifacts had not been inventoried since 2004, so the general pattern for the process was speed by half of a shelf full of things that were fully accounted for, then get stuck for a short while on a small group of things that either had incomplete or no records.

Some of the most notable objects I had the chance to see in storage were a bottle of poison antidote, an original copy of The American Weekly periodical from 1951, and several early twentieth century men’s dress shirts and detachable starched collars. I also had the opportunity to identify an object that had a poor description (was described internally as “round metal object,” or similar) with a quick online search; the artifact was a cutter made for shaping donuts out of dough.