McCurdy Progress

Hello, all!  Lisa and I have been making progress in our inventory of the Michael McCurdy Collection.  The last couple of weeks we have been inventorying the correspondence that was removed from the original shipping boxes (arranged by book title) and taken to the Print Stacks.  Everything seems to be accounted for there, although there were some inconsistencies between what's there and the Collection Overview from which we've been garnering our information.  We've been using an Excel spreadsheet similar to what the Print Inventory is using, and we've been color-coding the line items with green or red to signify if we've found the item.  Some other colors have been used to signify other things as well.  So far this system has worked well enough, although we decided yesterday that it would be very helpful to keep a key in the spreadsheet that delineates which colors mean what!

After finishing an inventory at the container level, we decided that it made sense to start foldering and rehousing everything as we go through with an item-level inventory.  The Collection Overview we have lists every item (/group of items) in detail, but it's not very clear.  There are also several "Miscellaneous" boxes, so we need to ascertain the contents of those and insert them into our arrangement.  We have decided that, while the Collection Overview is arranged by date of the work, and while the boxes have no clear intellectual arrangement, the most logical arrangement for the collection is by title, in alphabetical order.

Yesterday we started at the beginning of the list of titles and have begun foldering while checking our Excel spreadsheet at the item level to account for all of the items.  We are using telescoping boxes (not sure of the size), so that we can place larger artwork (in interior folders by title and by type) along with smaller manila expanding files containing smaller items like thumbnail sketches and tissue paper drawings.  We have also separated the scratchboard drawings, which are much heavier than other mediums, into separate telescoping boxes, also by ABC order.  So, the final intellectual arrangement will have them all together, but they are treated as "oversized" items (of which there are others in the collection), and will be housed separately.

We ran into some problems with the multiple "miscellaneous" boxes in the collection.  These boxes have book jackets, scratchboard drawings, sketches, and other similar items to the rest of the collection.  Most often, however, they only feature one example of work from a title, as opposed to the other boxes that represent an entire book's worth of artwork, proofs, and annotated sketches.  So, after completing a couple of boxes, we found items in a miscellaneous box that had to be brought to the front of the collection, and then had to rearrange the boxes.

There are only about four boxes arranged so far, but they look great!  We've only given them temporary labels, but once the arrangement is finalized we can print labels and affix them to the boxes.  It's exciting to see the collection go from a mass of unorganized shipping containers to several beautiful telescoping boxes!  Breaking down the cardboard from the previous containers is verrrrrry satisfying :)

After!

Before...