By Juan Davila
This week was very interesting and insightful to the process of museum work. Alejandro an Archivist from WACC came to the Chamizal National Memorial and guided us in the process for the creation of a Scope of Collections. Me and my partner from LHIP learned a lot from Alejandro’s knowledge and tears of experience from working on the NPS. The previous week we focused on finding all-important non-accessioned items and the accessioned items we wanted to present to Alejandro hoping he would instruct us as to how to archive them and properly maintain them.
Figure 1: Meeting Alejandro
As mentioned before last week we went off site to the warehouse and searched for artifacts, documents, or objects that were in need of moving to proper maintaining facilities. In which they could be properly stored but also to see what things they had in the warehouse because the staff was not aware of so many objects being stored in site. Many of the objects inside the warehouse are not properly preserved or have the proper documentation. The warehouse has been the last station where the museum has stored most of the objects and it had no current purpose for the last 10 years. Here, I found many objects, ranging from old films and cassette tapes to a motorized chainsaw and even some pamphlets from a rock concert celebrated in 2000 at the Chamizal Park. Thanks to this search, we realized the paintings were not properly stationed in the room. We ordered packets so that we could raise all the paintings in proper prevention from flooding.
After Alejandro’s visit, he concluded that we needed to finish our document describing all non-accessioned items. The document would help us better understand what objects we have in our collection and the best way to separate and catalog the different collections. It was decided that all picture frames, art and films would be sent to WACC so that they would be in a better-preserved environment. Alejandro promised he would send us box containers to store all the films and art. He also promised that later in the summer, he would come pick them up. I continued working on the non-accessioned document the following week and organized all film we had pertaining to their years.
Figure 2: So many objects being stored on site!