Quote:
Originally Posted by Exhibitman
I was surprised and saddened by how little the curators knew about the cards (as I said above, they could not even find many of the sets I needed because they did not know Burdick's nomenclature and when I tried to talk cards with them, they obviously had no idea what I was saying). It was sad as well to see just how under-utilized and under-catalogued the cards were. Burdick did a monumental job of collecting and mounting these cards, but a crappy job of cataloguing and indexing them. There are albums with literally nothing to define what is in them other than a single line entry. It appears that no work has been done to see what is in this collection over the last 40 years. In the boxing cards alone, I found literally dozens of unknown cards and variations that have been sitting there for 40 years, ready to be discovered. The head curator even admitted at the end of my visit that they don't know much about the collection.
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Interesting read, thanks Adam. Long what I had suspected about the Met curators / staff and their approach to the collection. Sad because a couple of trusted hobby veterans could probably go in there for a week or so and improve the cataloging and index immensely, but I doubt they will ever let that happen.