Today Walter Reed was having a disaster planning episode which involved locking down the AFIP building so all of the collections staff went out to the warehouse. I was running a bit behind because yesterday a curator at the National Gallery of Art called to say that while the Gallery found something interesting while a conservator was cleaning Thomas Eakins' painting of the Museum's first curator John Hill Brinton. The partially-cleaned painting has what was thought to be a curtain in the upper left corner, but instead appears to be a flag or heraldic device. They had hoped it would be a medical one that I'd recognize, but I was in the dark... More research to follow, but the painting should look great when it's finished in a few months.
Up at the warehouse, Kathleen and I inventoried boxes of early 20th century journals that the AFIP library had transferred to us years ago, and then helped restack Neuroanatomical's Yakovlev Collection's library. Kathleen also had been editing a finding aid of the James Moore Ball Ophthalmic Museum collection which is a very large group of material on eyes and vision from the turn of the 19th century. I had to leave early to go to another building to get my warehouse ID card renewed and then popped back into the museum to update location in our database. Look for the Ball finding aid to show up on our main website soon.
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It was a good, productive day. I got there very early and had a couple of hours with no one else wandering in, no telephone, and no email. I'm cleaning up the Ball Finding Aid - reformatting to make it easier to read, correcting punctuation, making the entries consistent, etc. It's about 80 pages or so, and working on it has me jazzed to look at the actual collection: lots of illustrations of ophthalmic pathology.
We got our exercise with those bound journals. We were working on an upper level and had to raise the boxes on a pallet, then unload from there and carry the boxes to other shelves to stack. It's heavy work and not my idea of a good time, but still satisfying to get a lousy job out of the way.
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