International Women's Air & Space Museum Collections Re-Housing and Collections Care Improvement Project

FAIN: PG-287869-22

International Women's Air & Space Museum, Inc. (Cleveland, OH 44114-3726)
Meghan Anderson (Project Director: January 2022 to August 2022)
Elizabeth Konopka (Project Director: August 2022 to April 2025)

The purchase of shelving and storage supplies for the museum’s collection of paper-based, photographic, and three-dimensional artifacts, as well as environmental monitoring equipment to inform future preservation initiatives for the collections

As a result of the recent exhaustive collections inventory, the International Women’s Air & Space Museum (IWASM) has identified immediate preservation concerns that require the full rehousing of its permanent collection. The museum has an inherent concern as it is located inside an active airport along the shoreline of Lake Erie. This project seeks to address the preservation concerns presented of the collection, including rehousing one-of-a-kind artifacts info acid-free boxes. We will remove photographic prints from files where they are in direct contact with newsprint paper. With items from around the world documenting the extensive history of women’s contributions and experiences in aviation and aerospace, the museum is the steward of some of the lesser-known individual players of the world. This project will enable the museum to engage and make more widely available the vast resources and stories preserved in the collections for years to come.