Ramsey County Historical Society Internship: Rehousing Scrapbooks and Textiles

Two weeks ago, Lauren and I undertook the really labor intensive task of reorganizing scrapbooks that the previous intern, who quit because he had trouble doing the simplest tasks, had made a giant mess of on the shelves. The books were haphazardly stacked and facing in multiple directions, making it impossible to find the inventory tags on most of them.

You can see them in their disorganized state in this picture in the bottom left hand corner.

The navy blue and tan things

These are a collection of scrapbooks that follow the St. Paul Winter Carnival from 1938-1992. Each year has it's own scrapbook, with a few years having two or three. The creator of the scrapbooks has cut out and saved what seems to be every news article published in Minnesota regarding the Winter Carnival. Here is what the 1938 book looks like:

Every page is this full of articles...

These things are massive and extremely heavy. I was only able to carry at most, three or four at a time. They were very unwieldy and we constantly had articles falling out.

Our task was to take every scrapbook off the shelves, organize them by year and put them back on the shelves so that they were all neat and tidy with their tags easily accessible. This task took us nearly four hours.

Tah dah!!!!!

Woah! You can actually see the tags!

While this was an extremely tedious and smelly task, it was pretty cool to take a peek into the scrapbooks. We weren't interested in the articles at all, but it was fascinating to see all of the everyday advertisements. Usually, you only see the really high budget and flashy ads in textbooks and antique shops, but it was really interesting to see what types of ads were more typical. Here are a few from the 1950s:

Way less "nuclear family" than you usually see

Here is a look at the articles in a 1970s book:

These scrapbooks are an amazing piece of Minnesota journalism and an incredible glimpse into each year and the shifting styles of writing, photography and advertisement.

This week, Kevin told Lauren and I that we would have to rehouse the large textile collections. This really needed to be done because three of us interns had somehow seriously messed up the textile housing process and lots of the textiles had gone into boxes without the proper labeling and cataloging. That meant that Lauren and I had to unpack every box of large textiles, sort them by type, baby/child clothing, adult clothing, linens and delicate lace stuff/other. After getting everything sorted, we decided to first start with one pile and work our way through the piles systematically so that we could lower our chances for error. Because there was such a tremendous amount of textiles, we quick packed each pile into a box and put them back so that we could focus on the baby/children's pile. We ended up with this:

Still a mess...

First, I found the inventory number sewn into each item of clothing, wrote it down on a whiteboard and took a photograph of the item with its number so that it could be easily identified later. Lauren would then check the number of the item against our bad lists to see if the item had a catalog sheet and/or was in the database. About 70% of the items did not have catalog sheets and we noted which ones needed them so that we could take care of it another day. Then, the item would be packed into a box. This process may not sound difficult or time consuming, but it took us about an hour and a half to get through about 60% of the baby clothes.

While the process was tedious and aggravating, we came across some fun things: