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I would appreciate the list’s thoughts on a dilemma that we are facing with several new acquisitions. We have recently acquired a large number of historic textiles, garments, and related materials (palm fans, wooden textile beaters, etc.) from a defunct museum collection that was formed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of the items in this collection, which was designed to introduce Philadelphia’s entrepreneurs to the range of raw and manufactured materials available around the world, have historic tags or labels indicating such information as place of origin, cost of production, manufacturing details, etc.
My question is regarding whether or not these tags should be preserved IN PLACE, or if it is preferable that they should be removed and stored in a mylar envelope or similar enclosure (appropriately numbered) in the accession file for preservation of this information. In most cases, I should mention, these tags and labels are not very securely attached to the objects (where the attachment is more or less permanent, we would not remove them), and the tags themselves are brittle and discolored. I’ll cite a few specific examples to give you an idea of the situation: 1)a group of Philippine pina cloth samples with paper tags indicating their town of origin and collection date pinned with straight pins to the samples (all tags discolored, some creased and brittle); 2) a number of heavy wooden cloth beaters with paper tags indicating origin on string looped around the handles of the beaters – again tags are discolored & embrittled, and the beaters tend to roll, even in a custom-made storage box, thus threatening to bend and/or break the attached tags; 3) a wooden and woven coir Chinese clog (pre-1895) with a brittle string & paper tag recording origin & sale price looped around the also-brittle coir upper.
The historic value of these textiles obviously is tied closely to the documentation that these tags and labels provide, and I hesitate to separate the two. At the same time, this documentary evidence seems to be put at risk by leaving these tags in place, where they are not firmly affixed; in addition, the acidic nature of these tags represents a danger to the long-term preservation of the textiles themselves. I would appreciate listmembers’ thoughts on how best we can balance these seemingly contradictory preservation demands.
Nancy E. Packer Collections Curator The Design Center at Philadelphia University
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