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Curators turning to online excavation
INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana (AP) -- Forget musty, dusty museum storerooms. Curators nowadays are digital archeologists, digging deep into the Internet for a touch of humanity to warm the cold slate of history. Using online auction searches, Bruce Johnson, a buyer for the Indiana Historical Society, found love letters written nearly 100 years ago between an Indiana farmer and his girlfriend. He also uncovered photographs of Confederate prisoners of war at a camp in Indianapolis. "The thing that always amazes me is that this is the only way that I could have possibly found these particular kinds of items," Johnson said. Museums and historical societies across the country now look beyond neighborhood garage sales and antique shop piles, just as NASA contractors have turned to online auctions for spare computer parts and lawyers have found old documents and other evidence in the expanse of cyberspace. These acquisitions have helped museums do more than plug holes on a wall and fill display cases: They put a real face on the past that only a visitor's imagination could do before. The old beer bottles and board games help shed light on how people lived way back when. Though eBay is the largest online auction site, and the most popular among curators, there are literally thousands of sites -- with names like BidCow.com and Haggle Online -- where they can bid. Johnson once found an album of 121 photographs taken during the construction of Gary, Indiana, a steel town east of Chicago that grew into Indiana's principal industrial hub. A dealer in Alabama was selling them on eBay. "A unique set of circumstances allowed that to happen," Johnson said of his luck in finding the photographs. "And you can multiply that many-fold just by the nature of the beast." Everyday mementosFor an exhibit on 1940s American culture, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History went to eBay to round up war bonds and period stamps. The Vermont Historical Society bought skiing brochures printed when the state's industry first began to boom.
An advertisement in an early 1900s copy of the "Ice Cream Quarterly," looking for franchises willing to sell Eskimo Pies in Omaha, Nebraska, caught the eye of curators at the Nebraska Historical Society in Lincoln. They also bought china pieces with a pattern that had inspired a Nebraska quilter. "I get excited about some of the everyday things of the past that people usually don't think to keep," said Deb Arnz, one of the museum's senior curators. Before online auctions, museums usually found only the valuable items like wedding dresses that people saved through generations -- not the everyday dungarees. As director of historical resources at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, Judy Endelman is always on the lookout for everyday mementos. The museum found penicillin bottles from the years following World War II when the drug first became available to the public. An online auction also uncovered a pack of Camel cigarettes, still in the cellophane, produced before the government began requiring that each package display a warning from the U.S. surgeon general. "There is a person in the world who is collecting just about anything you can think of," Endelman said. "It's just the trick of finding it." Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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