HUMBOLDT — The Humboldt and District Museum is going to get an extra pair of hands to help catalogue and photograph the items that memorialize the Humboldt Broncos collision.
Council approved hiring a short-term employee to help with the effort for 35 weeks at its Jan. 27 meeting. The budget for that is around $18,000.
“The recommendation is to really move this collection work forward and wrap it up in 2020,” Jennifer Fitzpatrick, the city’s cultural services director, told council. “It’s an important collection for the city.”
Work on cataloguing the collection began in summer 2018, with 4,033 items completed. There is an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 items left.
The museum staff have been the ones doing the work.
“Unfortunately, because the focus of the work was on that collection, the main collection work for the museum – we took in 1,100 items in 2019 – we now have a backlog of about 1,000 of those items,” Fitzpatrick said, adding that the museum is expecting a collection of another 500 items in 2020.
The money will come from a reserve made up of money the city received in the aftermath of the April 2018 collision.
