IPAM Partners Weave Handbook to Protect Textiles

The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., frequently receives requests from museum professionals around the world for advice on textile care and management. Through AAM's International Partnerships Among Museums (IPAM) exchange program, Rachel Shabica, registrar at the Textile Museum, and Roya Taghiyeva, director of the Azerbaijan State Museum of Carpet and Applied Art (Carpet Museum) in Baku, engaged in an 18-month collaboration on an electronic handbook for managing textile collections. Through this partnership, the pair was able to identify which of the Textile Museum’s techniques would be most generally applicable and adapt them for international implementation.

Both museums contributed expertise to the reference resource. The Textile Museum documented policies and techniques used by staff in various departments to determine best practices in areas such as collection management and how to display the works. The Carpet Museum contributed to sections on the protection and recovery of cultural property in emergencies, especially during times of armed conflict.

Preparing this material had the unexpected benefit of improving the Textile Museum's collection stewardship practices, as information formerly scattered across several departments is now easy to find and accessible to all staff. The information in the forthcoming handbook, which will be available on the Textile Museum's website beginning in late summer, will be more in-depth than that previously hosted on the website, according to Shabica.

The pair also benefited from sharing experiences and advice on the broader experience of working in a small museum, said Shabica, who spent time in Azerbaijan during the partnership. "As I spent more and more time with the staff of the Carpet Museum during my stay in Baku I was continually struck by how comparable their struggles were to our own. It was discovering the different ways in which we each handle these challenges that made the partnership so fascinating and so useful," she said.

The Textile Museum and the Carpet Museum plan to collaborate on an exhibition of Azerbaijan carpets in the near future.—Francine Rinzel