Here's a funny story...

Ah, its that time of year again in the museum world! That time when curators everywhere spend hour upon tedious hour conducting that all important Collections Management procedure - a comprehensive collections inventory. Now, if you're not a museum curator, this phrase probably means nothing to you, and furthermore it doesn't sound like it would produce a funny story. Ah, but there you would be wrong - especially when it comes to my museum and its whackadoodle existence. A collections inventory (which in all honesty is not performed every year - maybe every 5 years or so, if you're lucky) is when the staff of a museum visually accounts for every single item in its historical collection. Every plate, every chair, every painting, every fragment of something that might have once been attached to something more important - if its been accessioned into the collection, we (and by "we", I mean "I") have to track it down, verify that its where we thought it was, and make note of the confirmation in a computer database of some sort. If a museum has been professionally run for a number of years, this process isn't too bad - you generally know where your stuff is. When you work at my museum you have a different situation. Since the early 20th century, my museum has collected stuff - lots and lots of stuff. Most of it was squirreled away in drawers and closets and put in boxes without labels. An entire generation of professional curators has spent the last 2 decades trying to rectify the situation, and I swear I'm so close to finally getting the place ship-shape! Then comprehensive collections inventory comes along and totally bursts that bubble. Just to give you a taste of what inventory season is like at my museum, here's a story from my last inventory project in 2005:

My interns and I were climbing around in a small cave-like storage room in the basement of the museum building. When I say "climbing around" I literally mean climbing over huge mountains of wooden crates, and hanging perilously from the edge of old steel shelving units. If I remember correctly, we were looking for a Revolutionary War-era button, which we believed might be in a box labeled "Miscellaneous" (that's a whole other story). One of the interns found a box that was about the size of a shoe box, which looked like a good candidate. We opened it and found a plastic bag containing a large quantity of a powdery substance and several fragments of what looked like old waxed paper. Clearly not a button. However, this new find presented a problem. Not being a historical munitions expert, I couldn't be sure, but the substance in the bag sure looked like gunpowder, and the waxed paper bits sure looked like the remnants of old gun cartridges. The question then arose, how does one responsibly deal with or dispose of old explosives? My interns and I just looked at eachother for a while - this was a new one, even for my museum. So, thinking that the stuff in the bag surely wasn't dangerous anymore (it was obviously old, and it would have exploded by now if it was going to, right?) I tossed the onto my desk, where it sat for several days until I had a chance to make some calls to the local fire department. Apparently my phone calls put the fear of God into the firemen. "You did what with it?!?!?!" they exclaimed, "Its sitting on your desk?!?!?! Get it outside NOW!!!!" Okay, so I ran that baby out the door, down the stairs and into our historic rose garden as fast as I could. Within minutes a fireman showed up and put the bag in a bucket and covered it with sand, then strung up caution tape all around it. Next, in rolls the bomb squad - THE FREAKIN' BOMB SQUAD!! And they're wearing all that gear you see on TV, too! I have to admit it was kinda cool. Anyway, the bomb squad people put the "ordnance" in an iron box, which they would then take to a firing range and blow up. Luckily, it made it out of the museum without blowing up prematurely.

Needless to say, that was one of my more memorable days on the job. And it was all because of the collections inventory. Can't wait to see what I find this year!