P R E S E R V I N G T H E PA S T Katie Tucker watches carefully as collections assistant Elizabeth Fouts explains to her how to cut a piece of corrugated board, cover it with batting, and upholster it with unbleached muslin to create a padded mount to protect an object. Fouts demonstrates with a support she’s built herself, for an Inuit harness swivel made from sealskin, walrus ivory, and whale bone, which is tied delicately into place. Tucker, a sophomore history and anthropology major working on a museum studies certificate, looks eagerly at her own object. It’s a needle made from caribou antler, used by the Dogrib people to make fishing nets. 23-year-old graduate UI student Frank Russell collected both artifacts on a grueling expedition to Canada’s Far North from 1892 to 1894, gathering hundreds of cultural objects and natural specimens and traveling thousands of miles, much of it in snowshoes. “I love that Russell was a student here when he collected these items, and it’s come back to us,” Tucker says. “The collection is old, but it’s in great shape.” Tucker is one of several students helping to rehouse the more than 1,000 objects in MNH’s Arctic ethnographic collection, and she sees it as an important skill-building experience. “I want
to be a museum curator, and I knew I wanted to do an internship here,” she says. The museum is able to upgrade the supports and storage for the objects in the Arctic collection thanks to a $6,000 Preservation Assistance Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Eric Yang, a junior in studio arts, and Rachel Hileman, a junior history major pursuing a museum studies certificate, are also completing internships with the project.
COLLECTIONS
“These objects are important because they’re a kind of documentation of peoples or ways of life that don’t exist anymore,” says Cindy Opitz, collections manager. The museum has also received $4,302 through the State Historical Society of Iowa’s Historic Resource Development Program to preserve and digitize its collection of glass slides and negatives. The diverse collection includes photos taken on museum expeditions from the 1890s through the 1920s as well as slides probably used in UI classes. “They show us a lot about the
habitat in which things might have been collected, or how peoples that were encountered during these expeditions might have lived,” Opitz says. The museum has committed 540 hours of student intern and volunteer time to rehousing and digitizing the glass slides. Art and art history graduate student Alison Rosh and undergraduate Staci Kirsch volunteered on the project over the summer.
Opitz is grateful for the external funding sources that help protect and preserve the museum’s extensive collections, and to the interns and volunteers who do much of the hands-on work. “Without grant money, not much happens, because everything takes money,” she says. “We’re fortunate that we have students who want to work on these projects and can gain valuable experience doing so.”
07 uiowa.edu/mnh