Eating the Elephant

It's an old joke:

How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.

Today is a milestone day for the project as we begin moving the more than 13,000 objects that comprise the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection back home. Years of planning rolled into design, construction, temperature and humidity data collection and analysis and passion to create a space that is second to none, anywhere in the United States.

But before any of that happened the collection needed to be packed and moved to secure offsite storage for the nearly three years it took to reach today. Remember, this is easily the largest University-held collection in the nation and it most of it had never seen the light of day, let alone get packed and moved out then moved back again.

It is worth sharing again the spectacular blog (http://hlatc.blogspot.com/) created by Diana Zlatanovski the associate curator of the Collection, that documented the process of moving the objects out of the building. Please take a moment and start at the bottom of her blog - she did a wonderful job photo documenting the space where the collection used to live and how we actually moved it out. I still remember the large rolled textiles being hand-carried down 4 flights of stairs with people on either end trying to keep it level. Now that's commitment.

Once again it is the caring hands of dozens of people who have come together to make this move possible - from the hands of the dozens of volunteers who cut muslin, coroplast and scrubbed the cabinets clean, to the hands of the people from Coakley who moved our collection out of the building over the semester break December/January 2009-10, and now back again, the elephant has come full circle.

But I most want to thank:

Erin Hamilton, Maggie Ordon, Barbara Bradley, Ericka Knapp and Lynn Mecklenburg

who confronted the elephant named "moving back home", stared it down and very precisely ate it all, one bite at a time.

Bon Appetit!