Conservation, Storage, and Technology

• Home>
• Current Students>
• Facilities>
• Textiles and Clothing Museum>
• Conservation, Storage, and Technology

Conservation, Storage, and Technology

The Textiles and Clothing Museum uses new technologies to link theoretical knowledge with hands-on experiences. Visual literacy is as vital to students today as written and oral communication. Active learning through exhibitions, museum programs, and object-based activities in the classroom supports and enhances the learner’s experience, promoting creative thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills. Within the museum are these facilities:

The Donna Rae Danielson Conservation Laboratory

The Danielson Conservation lab is a 375-square-foot specialized laboratory and classroom where textiles from the collection are cared for and preservation methods are taught.

Professor Donna Rae Danielson received her B.S. (1957) and M.S. (1961) from Iowa State University and joined the Textiles and Clothing faculty in 1964. Danielson retired in 1991. Following her death in 2006, her estate provided a significant bequest toward the establishment of the new Textiles and Clothing Museum.

The conservation lab is a teaching facility focused on the conservation of the museum’s collection. We are not accepting contract work at this time.

The Bertha and Edward Waldee Storage Facility

The Waldee Storage Facility is an environmentally controlled 700-square-foot space in which current conservation standards are practiced. This storage space secures approximately 6,000 of the museum’s 9,000 artifacts in compact storage units.

Edward Waldee received his B.S. (1937) and Ph.D. (1942) in plant pathology from Iowa State College and worked abroad in international agriculture development. Bertha J. Waldee was a professor in the Textiles and Clothing program at Utah State before her marriage. The Waldees gave the collection numerous examples of textiles collected from their travels abroad.

The Waldee estate provided funding for the state-of-the-art storage facility.

The Textiles and Clothing Social Justice Research Center

The Textiles and Clothing Museum Social Justice Research Center is used as a research and teaching space for students and faculty to examine different objects while always centering justice-oriented philosophies. The space is used as a meeting space to question dominant narratives, reject discriminatory practices in fashion history, and philosophize about justice, fashion, history, and culture.

The center is located in 2078 LeBaron Hall.

This space also houses the museum’s Radical Fashion Library which consists of over 100 fashion-related and social-justice centered books. The space also stores about 3,000 clothing, accessory, and textile objects from our collection.

Collection management and research: A PastPerfect software database is used for collection management. Information entered in PastPerfect facilitates the use of garments for research and teaching purposes and allows for research opportunities for faculty, staff, and students.