10:15 - 10:45 am
Museum, Library, and Archives and the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center
Colleen Curry
Yellowstone Center for Resources

Transcript

Colleen Curry: Good morning everybody. My name is Colleen Curry and I’m the park curator. I‘ve been here about two years and today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the museum collections, archives, and library as well as bring you up to date on our new heritage and research center, talk about our move that we did last summer which was the largest collections move in park service history and we did it without losing any objects, breaking any objects or hurting anyone so that was pretty good.

This is our new facility for those of you who have not been down there yet. It’s a fantastic place it’s about 32,000 square feet state of the art collections storage and research facility. And we’ve got the park’s museum collection, archives, and library down there. Lee Whittlesey, our historian, is down there. We’ve got our botanist and herbarium collection stored down there. Ann Johnson and her archeology lab, which is fantastic space, she’s got that down there. And then we will eventually have a geology and paleontology lab but right now with all the rehab going on with the administration building, the winter use planning office is down there right now. But I’ll be talking more about it later. Especially we’re opening May 18th.  Community open house starting at 3 o’clock so please come on down there and then from that day on we’ll be open Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm.

This is a breakdown of our collections. As you can see the largest is the archives and we actually have the second largest collections in the park service. The largest is at Edison National Storage site in New Jersey. They have just over 6 million items. But we’ve got over five million archival items, a thousand feet of library holdings; that’s roughly about 20,000 volumes of books, we’ve got 140 linear feet of vertical files, and a good sized rare book collection that I‘ll be talking about a little later. Museum objects: we’ve got about 300,000 and those include about 90,000 historic photographs. Photographs: everything from William Henry Jackson’s photographs when he was part of the Hayden Expedition in 1871 right up to modern, some modern photographs. Archeology: we’ve got historic objects, early souvenirs, pamphlets, brochures. We have a good-sized transportation collection one of the largest in the park service. We have about 32 vehicles and they range from early stagecoaches to touring buses. I’ve got some photos later on of some of the things in the collection and our newest acquisition to the transportation collection was a two-stroke snowmobile. So we figured that’s played such a major part in the history of the park we had to put that in there. So, and then we’ve got of course geology and paleontology, biology specimens, the biology we’ve got a pretty large natural history specimen collection, and those are mostly mounted taxidermy mounts and unfortunately most of them were treated with arsenic up until the 1950s they used arsenic to preserve these things. So right now the natural history specimens are all bagged up in our processing room and we’re hoping to be able to tackle those later this year. And of course we have an ethnography collection a few items quite a good collection and of course art works and those include 22 original Thomas Moran watercolors.

Here’s a little, the next couple of slides I just want to give you a sampling of what’s in the collection the top is an early tally ho made by Abbott Downing from New Hampshire and those are it’s kind of cut off but at the top you can see the tally ho seat. And they basically would pile on (kind of up here) pile on gosh almost 30 people I think and take them from the Gardiner Depot up to Mammoth so they could begin switch over and begin their tour of the park. We’ve got a Haynes sign here from one of the photo shops and of course they had almost 80 years a little over 80 years in the park of concessions, with photographs and other things. Ah, we’ve got a James Everett Stewart painting here of the Lower Falls. He was kind of interesting in the he did this in about 1887. He was one of the first artists to come to the park to really take advantage of the tourist trade here. He saw a real, real boon to sell his art and he spent several summers here talking to the tourists and selling his art. A lot of times he would go back home broke but he kind of, he was an interesting fellow he struck a deal with the railroad. They gave him a free pass where he could go anywhere in the country in exchange for artwork. So he was a pretty interesting person. Right now that piece is on loan to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center as part of that Drawn to Yellowstone Exhibit. We have a cap here from one of the bus drivers in the Yellowstone Park Company. And it dates to about 1930s, 1940s. This writing desk I’m sure you all can recognize that. Those are still in use at the Old Faithful Inn. Those were made by the Limbert Company and date to about 1929. They’re pretty rare. This piece was in storage and so we were getting ready to move it out of storage this past summer. And then we’ve got photographs like the Troop M from the First Cavalry who were here in charge of the park from 1880s until about 1916. Uniforms, we have a collection of the National Park Ranger Museum. We collect park ranger uniforms as well as Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia so there are 2 collections of those.

I put in a slide here showing children books just to show you different things that we have in our library collection. We do have some fiction. In fact last summer one of the things that got us through the whole move and everything is we have even some Harlequin Romances that were based in the park and there was one that was I think what was it called Bachelor Father or something and its main character was park ranger Zeke Lonetree who single-handedly, single-handedly reintroduced the wolves to Yellowstone. So we did a little reading, excerpts from that at meetings it was kind of fun.

Of course everyone knows Thomas Moran’s paintings. He was part of the Hayden expedition and we have 22 of those the original watercolors that he did as part of that expedition and their great in that you can’t really see it but you can see a little bit up here. He did pencil sketches while he was out in the field and made notations on what color to go back and paint them and when he was back in camp he would paint them.

Ole Anderson here had coating racks at the Mammoth Hot springs terraces from probably the 1890’s early 1900s and he would coat artifacts and sell them in his store or objects and then he would also, people could drop off something before they started the 5 day tour of the park they could drop something off and he put it on the coating racks. And it’s interesting and when he was applying for renewal of his permits and everything the army was making an argument that he needed to do this because it was supposed to deter tourists from doing it on their own. So luckily we don’t do that anymore but we have several coated specimens in our collections from his time period.

This is a William Henry Jackson photograph taken in 1871 of some Bannock the Sheepeater Indians. This was taken near Fort Hall in Idaho. Of course we have a large postcard collection this is a Haynes postcard of the Old Faithful Inn lobby taken in about 1905. We have a large stereo view collection. And then this is a megaphone used by some of the bus drivers. This one dates about the 1930s. And then on some of our vehicles there was a sticker by the driver’s side that says, “Do not talk to the driver,” and they would basically put this over their shoulder and relay information as they were driving along.

FDR’s visit. Here he is with Eleanor and the superintendent at the time. He came in 1937.
And to show you some of the natural history objects. This is of course a bison skull and we have the skull of “Old Tex” who is supposedly the largest bison bred in captivity. We also have his hide we just got it a couple years ago. Brochures – this is a Sean Pell brochure from 1916 you can see you can do a trip through the park for $35. This is actually the last season that they were their own company. They merged after the 1916 season with the Wiley Camping Company and became I think the Yellowstone Park Camping company after that. Of course we have we have a large butterfly collection.  Here you see a red-tailed hawk. This was collected in 1929. Three Stooges, they visited, Yellowstone. Here they are posing by Castle Geyser. They visited in 1969. And then here we have a 1936 touring bus from the White Motor Company.

I just want to give you a really quick breakdown on the history of the collections. For those of you who don’t know, we used to be in the basement of the Albright Visitor Center and that included library, archives, and museum collection. Although through the years we’d grown and taken up about three to four other buildings, just storage in other buildings. But 1919 is kind of the earliest official notice that there was an exhibit room established in one of the buildings in Fort Yellowstone. And in 1922 we know that these specimens were exhibited in the visitor center. And then finally ‘28-‘31 we had branch museums opening up throughout the park and those were done in conjunction with the American Association of Museums. So what’s particularly interesting is the Fishing Bridge Museum pretty much exists still the way it did when it opened in 1931. 1960s saw a real surge in trying to collect Yellowstone artifacts and records. Aubrey Haines realized that these things were getting being lost and he actually, there’s a great quote he wrote a letter to Paul Schullery. And I also wanted to mention, those of you who haven’t seen last this past fall’s issue of Yellowstone Science focuses on the new Heritage Center and there’s a great, Tami Blackford from the publications office did a great article on the history of the collections and library and archives. So there’s still copies over in the Yellowstone Center for Resources if anyone hasn’t gotten any. But Aubrey Haines, this is his quote, “The bulk of the boxed incoming correspondence was found on the first floor washroom of the old administration office. There the boxes were stored on a high shelf above the john. It is my understanding that former superintendent Edmund B. Rogers had the boxes placed there after he’d snatched them back from the Mammoth dump where they were to be burned. Several boxes showed some scorching and I’ve always wondered if some did go up in smoke.” So we’re lucky that Haines did he did save a lot of this stuff. Yosemite on the other hand, a lot of their army records were completely lost because they were just taken to the dump and burned. So we’re lucky that we still have we have a pretty complete record of the administration of the park in our archives.

1978 the park signed an agreement with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) because in the early seventies folks in the National Archives began to realize the importance and the volume of the records that we had here in the park documenting the history and everything and they really wanted to get them and take them back to Washington and really it caused an uproar as you can imagine and we finally they were able to make an agreement with NARA and saying they can still they can still be NARA archives but we can keep them in the park because they just receive such a use from park staff and outside researchers. So in 1978 we became an official affiliate of the National Archives and we’re one of only 9 affiliates in the country. Some others included the West Point Military Academy, the Naval Academy, and the US Government printing office, as well as the Library of Congress. So as such we are subject to an annual inspection. They came out just this past fall and were real impressed with our new facility and of course now that we’re this large federal building down there they have us we have to be subjected now to security mandates and so we’re going to have in our new building people will have to show ids and sign in, sign out, that type of thing. They wanted us to install x-ray machines and we were like ‘no’ we don’t want to go that far so.

1989 was a big year in that there was an office of inspector general audit of the collections and they really found major deficiencies in how the items were stored. I mean at that point we had totally outgrown our spaces. Stuff as you can imagine was stacked, I’ve got pictures later on to show you, stacked on top of cabinets. I mean not the way you’re supposed to preserve and store artifacts. So we were written up on that one. That helped us really gave momentum and get our the HRC approved. So 1999 it was finally, the funding was approved and the planning continued on. They looked at several spaces for the building. They were looking up here in Mammoth near the mail carrier’s house. They were looking down where the power plant the old power plant building is, lower Mammoth but they just they found that the building with the travertine and everything was just too weak to support such a large building and so they finally settled on the space we’re at now. It was a disturbed gravel pit in down in Gardiner and it was already Park property. So that’s how we ended up there.

Here’s a little history on the research library and this is a little preview, this is our new, the entrance to the new library down at the Heritage Center. It’s on the upper floor. There are three floors. I’ve got some floor plans later on but it’s a great space. You can see it has the skylights, bare vaulted ceiling, but in 1908 there is a notice we do have a record that the superintendent asked for money from the secretary to purchase some books just to provide training for some of the soldiers that were the rangers and things like that. 1931 they formed the research library. They combined books from the Army Post library and other personal collections of Major Chittenden and several other superintendents and then in 1933 the Yellowstone Library Museum Association which is now the Yellowstone Association was formed and they were pretty much formed to take over control of the library and they’ve been in control of it from then until now right up I mean they’re still in control they provide funding for positions and acquisitions as well as projects. So I supervise the librarians but they are Yellowstone Association employees.

Here you can see some of our old spaces. Those of you that didn’t have a chance to go down to our, to the basement of the visitor center. Here is our old archives vault which is now the superintendent’s conference room. And we had luckily this never happened when I was here but we had several sewage backups and of course that’s not what you want when you’re storing records. Another view here we’ve got map cases, map cabinets stacked about six to seven high. You’re only supposed to stack them three high or else they can collapse. And I think we’re lucky that they never collapsed but we just had nowhere else to put it. This was our little rare book room closet, I guess you could say it was just a closet behind the old circulation desk and then here are our stacks, nice green army era shelving. And then this is some of the former museum storage. This was where the mailroom is now in the basement of the visitor center. And we’d actually already moved stuff out of here so it was much more crammed than this. And then here you can see three photos of vehicle storage. Right now our historic vehicle collections stored in one of the Xanterra buildings down in Gardiner and you have to go through the recycling center to get to it. So obviously not the ideal place to store all this furniture and other artifacts and really not ideal for the vehicles. And we’re hoping, the plan is on a later date to have a wing on the Heritage Center where we can store the historic vehicles collection and people can actually walk through and see them.

Office space in the old library. Here’s the old circulation desk. You can see this is a one table that we had for researchers. And then when we were gearing up for the move last summer, this used to be the old curatorial workroom and it’s now used by Judy Jenson in the mailroom as an office. We turned that into a packing station and basically to get ready for the move we scrounged up as many free supplies as could. Down in Tucson, the Western Archeological Conservation Center had just moved into a newly a new building that they were renting, so we were able to get several truckloads of stuff from them. We got new shelving from them that turned out to be a curse and a blessing as a lot of shelving pieces didn’t match up so it took a while to put those together. And then so we basically prepared this so that there could be a team here packing up the collections.

Other move preparations here we’re looking at the inside of the new museum storage room a far cry from our old little space. But here Bridgette Case is one of our museum techs. Here she is putting the shelving together and it was just it was a nightmare. I think we put together what like 60 to 70 plus shelving units and they’re about 110 inches high so you can imagine that took a while. Everything had to be cleaned, wiped down. We put, we purchased metro carts to maneuver objects and then here’s one of the teams. What we did to get ready for such a move. Basically I came on board in June 03 and was told ‘OK, you need to organize this move’ and I had come from several parks back east and had worked with Alice Newton who is the registrar at park service’s Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia and she’ in the conservation division. And I’d worked on several other collections moves with her so I said OK, we’re calling Alice, she’s like the NPS move guru. So she came in in August. This is her right here. She came in August of 03 and spent two weeks with me and we basically came up with a moving plan and also a storage plan for the new building so that we had an idea OK that when we move stuff down to the new building we have to know exactly where it’s going so we’re not kind of shuffling stuff around. So we broke, we recruited about 80 volunteers and broke them into 5 teams and a team came every two weeks and it turned out to be great for us because as you can imagine we were we were just we would be like by the end of two weeks we’d be like oh my gosh and then we’d get this fresh new team here that was like ‘Yeah, I’m in Yellowstone, we’re ready to go’. So that would kind of boost us up except that by the time the fifth team came we were like ‘OK we don’t want any suggestions, we don’t want any comments, we were all we thought of it, we tried it’, you know ‘cause we kept hearing, ‘Well,’ you know ‘Did you think of this? Have you tried?’ … ‘Yes, we have’. So but basically it was great we’d have a new team every two weeks and we use it as a training opportunity for other park service curators and archivist. So it really it turned out to be really good, a good deal.

Here is just kind of a brief how we packed up stuff the stacks in the library, we didn’t want to lose track of the order of the books so we used book carts here and put each shelf of a shelf of the book cart and shrink wrapped it. Here we’re wrapping up boxes of archives documents. We would wrap them on palettes and then we’d shrink wrap them and then we’d use these ties to keep them stable. And then every, everything that went down to the new building from Mammoth had this it’s kind of an inventory sheet it would list the objects that were included in that their location number catalogue numbers and also had a space right here for once they arrived at the new building the team down there could make a note of where they were going to be placed. And then we put all these in a binder and then we were using those as we changed new locations in our database. Here’s a palletized piece.

This is the upper floor of the HRC and it’s a great space as I showed you before. We have a reading room right here. Finally we have two media rooms where you can look at microfilm and also listen to oral histories or view tapes. Archive storage and we were able to purchase a compact shelving unit here to really maximize our space. I’ve got a photo of that later. New rare book room, which is great we definitely have room for expansion there and a new map room. The building was built to plan for 25 years of growth for the collections. We have it in the area up here and in the herbarium but we don’t have it in the museum collections. And then here you can see offices are on this side of the building. The building was built to take advantage of the sunlight on this side, the front side of the building so that all the office spaces were here and then this inner hallway is called a trammel design meant to take the brunt of the heat in the summer and the chill in the winter so that you don’t have to heat or cool offices as much and then we have sensor lights in all the areas that only come on as light as it is light outside so if it’s very bright out, they don’t come on very high. And then the back, the building doesn’t have any windows to maximize keeping the temperature constant. Here’s our new archives room. Compare that to our old vault. Here’s our compact storage unit. These are the first objects being off loaded to the new building. They’re part of the rare book collection. Here you can see more of the shelves. These bars were a way of trying to stabilize these shelving units. They’re so high and also with the earthquake zone we’re in they are bolted to the floor and then they are also bolted to each other with these little cross beams.

Herald Housley our park archivist. One thing that we were one of our things that we were in trouble with well not in trouble with with the national archives but. Our agreement from 1978 said we had to have an archivist, a permanent archivist on staff. And we didn’t, Lee was the permanent archivist, gosh it was a long time before you became so they hadn’t had one for quite a while and Harold was just he was a term so he wasn’t permanent. And when they visited us in the fall they said you know we and pull all this stuff we can just take all these records and move them back to DC and we knew that was a veiled threat because they’re not going to want to take 5 million records to them, but they could the object was that they could if they wanted to and so we were able to get a permanent archivist position and Harold applied and we were able to get to him on a cert an hire him which is great because he‘s been here since ’98, I believe.

Here’s our a view of part of the map room. Yellowstone research library again the entrance to it. We have beautiful Thomas Moser furniture thanks to the Yellowstone Park Foundation. We knew that this great new space we couldn’t move our old government issue furniture in there including our old green army library stacks and so we were able to purchase shelving and then through the funding from the Yellowstone Park Foundation purchase this Thomas Moser furniture so we’ve got several study carrels, computer stations, and then reading tables and then here is a view of the two media rooms and then little seating areas there.

Museum collections here you can see we’re kind of getting ready to move all these. This was all in vehicle storage. You can imagine they were just filthy just from the grime and everything the building’s not very sealed. It’s a 1920s building. So basically everything moved from the vehicle storage area had to be cleaned twice. It was cleaned at vehicle storage and then when it was moved to the Heritage Center it was placed in the lobby where we cleaned it again before moving it into the storage room.

Here they’re trying to decide where we’re going to put all of these shelving units. And then we had to clean everything. Once these cabinets were emptied here in Mammoth, they were moved down to the new Heritage Center empty and they had to be cleaned several times before we could put more objects into them.

Special concerns. You can see we have several pieces of a stagecoach bound together here. Other things we had to vacuum, some of the wagons before they were moved out. And then here is a group in the lobby of the Heritage Center working on cleaning them. And then we used, we have a curatorial workroom. This door right here leads into the main museum storage room. With this little anteroom kind of served as a holding place. Once the objects arrived on the site, we kept them padded and wrapped until we were able to move them out to the lobby to clean them and then move them into the storage room.

Here’s the museum collections storage. Great space and we’re lucky in that we received money from SEPAS project (Special Emphasis Program Allocation System ) to purchase compact shelving for this area. So we’re going to have compact shelving here, here, and also over here. That’s really going to maximize our space.

We have cold storage. The 90,000 plus images that are part of the historic photograph collection are stored in here. It’s the best way to preserve them so it’s great to have that. The walk in freezer that we’re using right now for pest management. Anything that came out of the historic vehicles like rugs and things like that we wrapped then in plastic, sealed them and placed into the freezer to monitor them to make sure the insects and everything are off of them before we actually put them in the museum storage room. And then Jennifer Whipple here is her herbarium storage. Her office is here and she has a research room as well. Again, just some more views. This end of the storage, the museum storage took all of the furniture collections and we have a pretty sizeable furniture collection. And a lot of it is still in use in the parks and so this summer we’re bringing a furniture conservator out from the Harpers Ferry Center and he’s going to do a collection condition survey on all the pieces, especially the ones that are still in use in the hotels and inns to determine OK how are they being effected by all the use. Years ago Susan Kraft the former curator went and actually numbered, physically numbered some of the objects that she had chosen for the collection. Well they have since the numbers have since been painted over and pieces have been reupholstered so we’re just concerned about losing the historic integrity of some of these pieces. So we’re going to bring the conservator out. He’ll look at it and let us know ‘OK these pieces are really fragile, they need to be pulled’ and so we’ll be working with Xanterra on that, too.

And then every object had to be rehoused and by rehousing we mean a special support made for it not only for when it was carried down the hill but also for its storage itself like here’s a little bean pot and you can see it’s sitting on an ethafoam base which is just a type of museum quality foam and then it has little supports here to keep it from rocking and then the lid itself is tied in place so that it doesn’t move. And basically had to do that with almost every object. It was very labor intensive. Here they’re packing up some containers.

Here Alice Newton is rolling a flag. A lot of these flags had been just folded up and put in drawers and after a while the creases, the fibers break down and you get loss of the historic fabric

(Am I running out of time? OK, I’ll hurry)

Here the receiving objects, there were four different teams of the people who actually when they got here we divided them into four teams. We had one, actually two up at Mammoth one was devoted to archives and library and they were packing up all the archives stuff. One was responsible for packing up all the museum collections. One was down at our vehicle storage and they were responsible for going through all the objects down there cleaning them and packing them up and then we had a team. Here’s Tasha Felton and Bridgette were in charge of the team here at the Heritage Center and they would receive all the objects and those forms that I showed you they would take those forms and write new locations on them and make sure that all the items were rehoused or placed in new storage locations.

And then these are some off our new locations, part of the uniform collection. Our saddle collection, some Native American items. The greatest thing is we finally have proper storage for the Morans and other artwork. Before the Morans were kind of stacked in an old army safe. And not the best way to store them and so we were able to purchase several art cabinets that you see here and they are probably stored rolled textiles and the ceramics.

And you can see here we have bungee chords to try and stabilize the photograph boxes in cold storage in case of an earthquake. We’ve tied some of the larger objects to shelves, that type of thing. And then the lower floor has an incoming; all of the dirty functions are on the lower level, all of the lab space and processing rooms and I don’t mean I mean just as far as the objects are checked for pests and dirt and things like that before they move upstairs to storage. And this is our processing room downstairs. We do have a fume hood so that we can deal with the arsenic on those the natural history specimens that we have and also we‘ve had requests from Native American groups to do smudging ceremonies as we do have several funerary objects in the collection as well as some human remains and we’ve never been able to accommodate them in the past so this will be a great opportunity for us to do that.

Just a quick here the library and archive space increased 500% in the new building and the museum collections increased 700%. Which is just amazing. And our opening May 18th. Community Open House starts at 3PM. We’re going to be doing impromptu tours so feel free to just head down there and see the space. And then starting May 19th we’ll be open 8-5. The library will have regular hours it will be open Tuesday through Fridays from 9AM to 4PM and the archives and museum collections will be available by appointment only Monday through Friday. So, that’s it.

Does anyone have any questions?
How is the access to knowing what you have for just someone walking in? Is it in the process or is it computerized?
We’re working on that the archives there is an electronic inventory on our website. There’s a link and you can look at the master inventory for the archives. Our library, we do have an online database for the library. That’s through WYLS Wyoming Librarys database. Museum collections we don’t yet, we’re still working on that we’re hoping to do that at some point. So it’s basically a matter of when you call us to make an appointment to come in you kind of give us an idea of what you’re interested in researching and then we’ll pull stuff together for you.

What about security, Colleen, and what is going to be available to the public when they do visit from 8-5 after May 18th?

The public will be able to access the main floor the lobby and May we won’t have the exhibits up yet but by the August 25th official opening we’ll have temporary exhibits in place and we’re starting with showcasing the Davis collection. So they’ll be able to come into the lobby, view the exhibits there, and then they can go upstairs to the library so they’ll be able to just hit those levels. The lower level will be closed to the public.

Anyone else? Well great then thank you.