Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 6, Number 1, 1 January 1989 — It's Easier Than You Think [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

It's Easier Than You Think

Visitina Heirlooms At Bishoo Museum

When you were still a child, your Great Auntie Florence donated three of your family's prized calabashes to Bishop Museum. You're grown up now, with children of your own, and you'd like to bring your 13 year-old daughter to the museum to show her the bowls and talk about what they meant to your family. Can you see them? Yes. All the items in Bishop Museum's varied col!ections, from family heirlooms in the ethnology collection to rare snails in the malacology eollection, are accessible to donor's families, to researchers and to members of the public. To see an item that interests you, all you have to do is contact the registrar's office, whieh will put you in touch with the appropriate collection manager. The registrar's office is a clearinghouse for information on artifacts and specimens that have been loaned to or given to the museum. Every object owned, borrowed by or otherwise in the custody of Bishop Museum has been documented in the registrar's officer, whieh serves as a control point for movement of objects on or off the museum grounds. To arrange for you to see the calabashes, registrar Janet Ness will need to know the name under whieh your Auntie donated the bowls, and, if you know it, the date when she brought them in to the museum. With that information, she will search through her index to Donor's Names for the record of your family's calabashes. Onee she finds the record, Ness will contact anthropology collections manager Toni Han, give Han the information she needs to identify the bowls, and tell her that you wish to see them. Han will then contact you or await your eall, and an appointment will be made for you and your daughter to see the bowls. The best days for visit to the anthropology collections are Tuesdays through Thursdays between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. On the day of your visit, you would meet Han or an assistant at an agreed-upon location and be escorted to the anthropology collections area. Han will have you sign her guest book and fill out a collections use form that asks for your name, affiliation, title, address and phone, as well as the

reason for your visit and your intended use of the object (whether for personal reasons, for publication, for student research or for other uses.) Completing the use form will not only add to the history of our artifacts by recording who visited and why they eame, it will also enable collections managers to contact you in the future if new information becomes available on your artifact. After you've signed in, the last of your preparatiorrs is complete and you and your daughter will be taken into the collections storage area, where your family's calabashes have been set aside for you to examine. Your time in the storage area will be supervised, but picture-taking is allowed so that you ean create a personal record of the calabashes and share your visit with other family members. Most visits last about an hour, and Han suggests

that you make an appointment well in advance of your visit. This allows staff members time to prepare and assures that you will have plenty of time with the artifacts you wish to see. One possibility you should be aware of is that the objects you seek may not be at Bishop Museum. People have contacted the museum in the past, only to find that the objects they sought were in fact donated to another museum, or that the objects were only loaned to Bishop Museum, then returned. In that case, the Museum registrar and the appropriate collection manager ean help you decide where else to look for that priceless family heirloom — so you ean continue your effort to lead your daughter on a journey through your family's past.

HHHHHHHHHHHH Anthropology collections manager Toni Han shows calabashes to Luttrell Gabriel, right, and her mother and daughter.