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This set of mrmer, went or carried by one of Christopher Coim~--ms’s men in 1492, was locked by the Rttrtmonio Nacional, Real Armen* del Pz'tao de Madrid, and required the comsmaw* of a hermetically sealed cate.
I have always loved museums. As a child growing up in New York, I would spend my weekends at the American Museum of Natural History, where my father managed the museum shop. While he worked, I was given free rein to view the exhibition halls and planetarium. I got to know the curators, scientists, exhibition builders, security guards, and other staff that made the museum run. My favorite part was going with the curators behind the scenes to the vault areas. The majority of museums display only about 10 percent of their holdings at any one time; the rest is kept in storage and inaccessible to the public. As I gawked at the rows of exotic animal skins and drawers full of mounted butterflies and other insects from around the world, I began to realize that this is where a museum truly lives and breathes. These childhood weekends, my anthropological and archaeological studies at Syracuse University, and my mother’s love of history all prepared me for my work here at The Historic New Orleans Collection.
As collections manager / exhibitions coordinator, I oversee the registration and preparation departments, allowing me to work behind the scenes as well as interact with the public. Registrars form the heart and soul of any museum; they are
the gatekeepers of what comes in and out of our organization for any reason. They also secure legal ownership and maintain the legal records of an acquisition.
The preparators safeguard all of our holdings, whether they are on exhibit or in storage. Because The Collection is a museum as well as a research center, the public can request to see anything in our collection through our reading room. To ensure that holdings are safely viewed and handled by the reading room staff as they fulfill research requests, our preparators create specialized housings for items—acid-free paper and plastic sleeves for photographs, for example.
Both registration and preparation are vital to our exhibition team, working with curators and Director of Museum Programs John Lawrence to bring a vision to life. Years of planning go into selecting items and determining how and where they will be displayed; dealing with special lender requirements, such as light, temperature, and humidity levels; making or ordering display cases according to the exact dimensions of featured items; and constructing platforms and special barriers in the exhibition space.
One memorable challenge came during the installation of Common Routes: St. Domingue-Louisiana, our
first major exhibition after Hurricane Katrina. We were working with a lot of loaned items, more than 100 from US irut; rations and approximately 60 from organizations in France and Spain. One of those loans, from Spain, was a set of 15lh-century armor—iron helmet; iron, leather, and bronze breastplate; and halberd, or a long-handled weapon— worn or carried by one of Christopher Columbus's men when he landed in St. Domingue, the French colony on the island of Hispaniola, in 1492.
After we put the pieces on the display form and pedestal, the Spanish courier who delivered the precious cargo said, “Now we can put up the hermetically sealed case around it.” Mortified,
I	said, “What hermetically sealed case? No one ever mentioned a hermetically sealed case!”
The exhibition was set to open in just two days. Panic was not an option, and with everyone’s input from the exhibition team, as well as help from our master carpenter at the time, Larry Falgoust, the sealed case was completed and the exhibition opened on time.
This camaraderie among THNOC staff members has kept me here for the past 30 years. If they will have me, I hope for at least another 30.
—	Warren J. Woods
10 Volume XXX, Number 3 — Summer 2013