American Textile History Museum Rehousing Project:

Project Duration: 55 Hours

Provenance:

The American Textile History Museum which was located in Massachusetts was dissolved in 2016, and as a result, a large portion of that collection was acquired by the Henry Ford Museum. Of those acquisitions, a collection of hundreds of textile sample books, printing orders, strike off orders and design sheets dating from the 1870s to the 1940s were all individually boxed and brought here. After an initial set of efforts to remove books with the presence of mold from these boxes, they were ready to be stored and palletized for the time being.

Since each book was individually packed into a box and it was recently deemed safe to consolidate multiple items into one box, doing so would minimize the space the books took up in storage. On top of that, each object could then be physically accounted for and added to the database in this process.

Rehousing:

During the consolidation process, we found that we could fit two books to a single box, which greatly helped minimize the amount of pallet boxes needed to hold the collection. To mitigate wasted space, handles were made for some boxes so that they could be safely stored vertically, and this too greatly helped in lowering the overall number of pallets needed to accommodate the collection.

Overall, the rehousing more than halved the amount of boxes needed to hold the collection, allowing for it to take up less space. The unused boxes were also a great new source of storage for other items in the collections.