Crunch Time

This week I continued to research items for the exhibit. We're a little nervous because I guess the exhibit is coming up in a few weeks, and the professors haven't been helping out as much as we'd hope. I went to a lecture by Julie Fremuth who is the rare books and paper conservator for the Clements Library. Her lecture was especially interesting, and I was able to talk to her afterwards and she was extremely kind. While I was in the Clements library I was able to check out a little bit of the new exhibit for the Native Americans. It was helpful to see how they displayed their books and created their labels. I've recently been exploring the Clements Library website and they have online exhibits. This is interesting because generally I feel like exhibits are important because you actually get to see the objects, but with this online exhibit there are very enlarged detailed images that actually allow you to better explore the objects than if they were in a case. The other thing that is interesting about the online exhibit, is that there would never be a need to remove it, so it will forever be accessible. The online exhibit concept is very interesting, but I would never hope for it to replace the real thing. On Thursday, while I was doing research in Special Collections, I ran into the paper conservator for the graduate library, Cathy Baker, and I was able to talk to her a little bit about the exhibit we're creating. She's going to have to prepare the objects for exhibit, and I really have no idea what that entails and she has agreed to involve me in the process. There is supposedly an amazing conservation lab at the Buhr facility on South Campus. This is really exciting for me, because in the end I'll have been able to see all angles of the process of developing an exhibit. I really had no idea how much work it was going to be!