Back Rooms of the Museum

The Anchorage Museum of History and Art had a reception for Museum members last night and we got to visit the back rooms to see the archives and parts of the collection that aren't on display because there isn't enough room for everything. Of course it was also a fund raiser to help pay for the new additions to the museum, but museum director Pat Wolf did a good job of mentioning that in passing. Definitely low pressure. She let the museum and the dedicated employees make the pitch just by showing us what they do and what the museum has. In the archives they have about 400,000 photos, in various collections. Some collections, like the ones in the pictures, are well labelled. Others not. Photos are kept in their collections and the organizing system of the collectors is preserved, though this can make it more difficult finding things. Volunteers help out. They said it takes about an hour to do all the work necessary to catalogue each print. That's a lot of volunteers. The Whale Hunt Story is an album done, if I recall this right, by a woman who worked some time in Nome and Wales around 1910. After she left, she made little albums with her pictures and descriptions and sent them to friends. The museum has two copies of this story, but each album is a little different.

Archives were on the second floor. For the second part, we went down to the basement.

Walter Van Horn, Director of Collections, showed us around and talked about humidity, preservation, dust, hard water, as well as the wide variety of things people donate. He also showed us the pictures that for now are in storage, including this John Webber drawing. Webber was an artist with Captain Cook's third voyage from 1776 to 1780. This is the original. Earlier, in the archives we had seen a book that was published in the late 1700s of Captain Cook's voyage that had a print of this.