By Wally Kennedy
wkennedy@joplinglobe.com
PITTSBURG, Kan. — If you lined up all of the documents from the Picher Mining Museum, they would be half the length of a football field.
The problem for Randy Roberts, curator of special collections at Pittsburg State University, is that the documents have not been organized.
“We have 140 boxes that are 12-by-15 in size. That’s 150 linear feet of documents,” he said. “But they are not organized. We have employment records, with production records and confidential health information.
“What we’re doing now is a preliminary inventory of the collection, going through it folder by folder and listing the contents. After that, we’ll put all of the like materials together and digitize them.”
The task to preserve the documents will be a daunting challenge, but the goal is to preserve as much of Picher’s mining history as possible. The university is teaming up with the Baxter Springs Historical Society to do that.
When the board of directors of the Picher Mining Museum decided last year to find a new home for its expansive collection, the Baxter Springs Historical Society and the university offered a plan that would achieve the board’s preservation goal.
The documents would be inventoried and housed in Axe Library at the university, which offers a climate-controlled environment for storage. The maps, artifacts and photographs from the Picher Mining Field will be housed in the museum at Baxter Springs.
“We have almost everything now that is coming from Picher. We think the display of the Picher collection will help preserve the history of the town, its schools and the mining industry,” said Phyllis Abbott, president of the Baxter Springs Historical Society. “We are working with people from Picher to put the display together and hope to have it completed by next summer.”
In time, a person will be able to access the documents through Web sites at the museum in Baxter Springs and at Axe Library.
Said Roberts: “Over the years, the Picher Mining Museum assembled one of the nation’s outstanding collections of records and artifacts that document the history of mining and, specifically, the miners of the Tri-State Mining District.”
Features of the collection include the records of the Tri-State Lead and Zinc Ore Producers Association, materials on the national lead and zinc industries of the era, mine safety and health issues, and ore production.
Roberts said the digitization of the documents won’t begin for a while, but that a person wanting a particular document will be able to get it from the university.
“We’ll scan it and send it to them,” said Roberts. “The digitizing will take some time because it is one of the largest document collections at PSU.”
When the documents were removed from the mining museum, they were temporarily stored in a vacant dwelling operated by the Picher Housing Authority. The documents were transferred to the library in late January. Had they not been transferred, they would have been lost in the May 10 tornado that struck Picher.
Ed Keheley, a member of the board of directors of the Picher Mining Museum, said the tornado destroyed the building in which the documents were stored at the housing authority.
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