44,000 Object Files

My street. The house I'm staying in is just to the left. 

Hobby Lobby

I have now completed my second week at the Museum of the Bible. It’s already been an interesting experience, very different from my past museum work.

The museum collection is housed at Hobby Lobby’s corporate headquarters. Yesterday I got to take a tour of the Hobby Lobby campus, which includes some six million square feet of warehouse, manufacturing and office space.

Hobby Lobby began as a framing company and its original name, Greco, is still evident in the framing department. Greco comes not from the ancient Greek world, but is a combination of the Green’s name and that of his original partner.

We took a couple of motorized carts around and saw people making items like ficus trees and barn wood frames. One made a stop at the layout room, which is a full-size mock-up of a Hobby Lobby store. In here, they work out which items will remain on the shelves and which will be replaced with new items. They can also look at the layout of the store (hence the name). Each item on the shelf has an attached sticker. This sticker indicates how many of that item was sold in the last month, so they can get an idea of what is and isn’t selling.

What happens to the cake?

One of the most interesting sections is the art department. Here, graphic designers create patterns from art and then use this new art to make anything from fabric to gift bags to wall decorations. Also in the art department we saw the area where they make the inspiration sheets that you can find throughout the stores. These sheets include ideas and directions for completing crafts with store supplies. While we were there, they were working on a cake shoot. Bakers had made beautiful themed cakes, decorated with fondant, and people were working to create elaborate scenes around the cakes. I don’t know what happens to the cakes after they are photographed, but I can tell they aren’t sent over for the museum staff to enjoy. Shame.

If the whole museum thing doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll look into this. These employees spend the day decorating cakes or trying new craft projects. Sounds like a good time to me!

MOTB

Of course, while my job site is Hobby Lobby corporate, I am really working with a separate entity, The Museum of the Bible, or MOTB. Still, I really enjoyed seeing the behind-the-scenes working of a major corporation.

I am joined this summer by two other interns. The other interns don’t have museum experience, but instead are completing theology and biblical language degrees.

Therefore, due to my experience with collections work, I was assigned to work with the registration staff, while they are working with the curators.

I joined them one day this week and worked on their current project, which is measuring scrolls. This first involves unrolling each Torah scroll, of which MOTB currently has over 1,700. They take a photograph of the beginning and end of the scroll, as well as the Song of the Sea, which is in Exodus 15. This text has a different layout from the rest of Torah, which means it is recognizable even to someone who doesn’t read Hebrew.

In addition, they measure the entire length of the scroll and then count the total number of klafs. A klaf is a section of vellum or parchment, which are sewn together to create the scroll. They also count the columns in each klaf and the lines in each column. I took some photographs and counted the lines in several scrolls. I enjoyed spending some time working with the artifacts and with the other interns.

Foundational Filing

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my main project this summer is developing a filing system for the collection. The largest portion of this task is making paper object files for each object. While my hand is sometimes cramping at the end of a day of writing information on folders, I am getting a very good grasp on the scope of the collection. Each folder heading includes the object’s accession number, acquisition number, dealer and a brief one to three word description of the object. This week I’ve made files for everything from Dead Sea Scroll fragments to Torah scrolls to Elvis Presley’s Bible to cuneiform tablets. Very exciting!

It is very interesting to be involved at the start of a museum. Everywhere else that I’ve worked, these things have already been in place. For example, the Holocaust Museum has rows of filing cabinets, already full to the brim, of accession files. As new objects are accessioned, the staff makes new files. Eventually the MOTB will be at this point, but first I must make files for the existing collection.

When I sit at the table, the kitties take up position right under my chair

Does this mean that I will make 44,000 object files this summer? I doubt it. I work very fast, but I can’t make the roughly 500 files a day that this would require.

I hope to do a variety of work while I am here, but it remains to be seen if I will have a chance to do more than work on the files. Despite the monotony of the work, it is kind of exciting to be a part of this foundational work for the museum.