Arkansas Studies Institute: The Move

The Butler Center has been a whirlwind of activity as we have started moving to the new Arkansas Studies building. This week, 2600+ boxes from the Clinton Gubernatorial Project made the journey across the street and into the new compact storage. Their old shelving soon followed and left a large empty spot in our storage area.

Encyclopedia of Arkansas staff is going to round out this week by moving their supplies today. Starting Monday, the manuscripts department will be moving, so I have spent this week preparing our collections. Thankfully, my wonderful co-workers have jumped in to help me when they had some spare time even though the job isn’t that glamorous. Special thanks go out to Sara and Jamie who spent hours helping me number each and every box with a neon sticky note.

To make the move easier and faster, we are numbering our boxes in order with a sticky note. Instead of having to read the collection number/box number/etc. to determine what goes where, we can simply load the boxes by the number on the sticky. By the time I left yesterday, we had labeled about 2900 boxes (and I'm not done yet!). The end result looks something like this:




Having severely underestimated the number of sticky notes required, Sara and I visited two Office Depot locations and relieved them of their stock of 4x6 super sticky neon post-its. She was gracious enough to let me take her picture as she negotiated our plunder.



One week down! Don’t forget: The Butler Center research room will be open next week, but manuscript collections will not be accessible until we reopen in the Arkansas Studies Institute.