A short post for something small, I think. Only a week's-worth of prompts to go now!
The museum has a few staff who have been here longer than I've been alive. And it's definitely full of people who can't THROW. ANYTHING. AWAY.
As a result it's chock full of stuff - not just museum stuff, awesome stuff, important stuff, general stuff...also heaps and heaps of stuff that really should have gone the way of the dodo. So to combat this, and generally improve the cleanliness of the space (because it's easier to clean when it's tidy, as most people probably know), we instigated a 6-monthly tidy-up week. We did our first one in January - I'm excited to see if we'll be back in time to tackle the next one!
Anyway, I had vague plans, but I could only feasibly do anything on the Monday, since the library was going to have visitors the rest of the week. It didn't matter anyway - about 3 departments decided that what they were going to tackle included a whole ton of books, so my day was spent rescuing library books from recycling dumps, and collecting books from other people. In the end I had three trolleys of books to sort through and deal with, which kept me busy for the rest of the month!
Amongst the stuff deposited by the paintings department was lots of pamphlets. Most were dealers' catalogues or sales lists, which we keep because they're important for provenance work and so terrifyingly ephemeral, largely due to their size, but one was a flyer advertising the services of the new print room and rt library of the City Art Gallery, Leeds:
In case you can't read it, it says: "Mr v. Hasselt / Mr Chamberlain } please see, it can then be thrown away. JWG [Jack Goodison], 14/XII/59." So it's been waiting over 60 years to be thrown away!
The museum has a few staff who have been here longer than I've been alive. And it's definitely full of people who can't THROW. ANYTHING. AWAY.
As a result it's chock full of stuff - not just museum stuff, awesome stuff, important stuff, general stuff...also heaps and heaps of stuff that really should have gone the way of the dodo. So to combat this, and generally improve the cleanliness of the space (because it's easier to clean when it's tidy, as most people probably know), we instigated a 6-monthly tidy-up week. We did our first one in January - I'm excited to see if we'll be back in time to tackle the next one!
Anyway, I had vague plans, but I could only feasibly do anything on the Monday, since the library was going to have visitors the rest of the week. It didn't matter anyway - about 3 departments decided that what they were going to tackle included a whole ton of books, so my day was spent rescuing library books from recycling dumps, and collecting books from other people. In the end I had three trolleys of books to sort through and deal with, which kept me busy for the rest of the month!
Amongst the stuff deposited by the paintings department was lots of pamphlets. Most were dealers' catalogues or sales lists, which we keep because they're important for provenance work and so terrifyingly ephemeral, largely due to their size, but one was a flyer advertising the services of the new print room and rt library of the City Art Gallery, Leeds:
In case you can't read it, it says: "Mr v. Hasselt / Mr Chamberlain } please see, it can then be thrown away. JWG [Jack Goodison], 14/XII/59." So it's been waiting over 60 years to be thrown away!
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