Dubuque County Historical Society (National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium)

The National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium will catalog, inventory, document, and re-house approximately 6,200 undocumented or under-documented objects in their collection, representing 35 percent of their total collection. This documentation is critical to the continued understanding of the people and cultures of the Mississippi River. The project will support two new Collections Assistants, who will work along with volunteers to catalog and inventory the collection. Then they will re-house the collection, replacing ordinary cardboard boxes with archival quality boxes, boxing previously unboxed items, padding out textiles or other similar items with archival tissue as needed, relieving overcrowding in boxes that contain too many items, and better organizing objects within boxes to further reduce risk of damage. The project will improve stewardship of the collections by correcting and expanding the documented information for 6,200 objects in the collection, resulting in a more complete catalog of object records.