When volunteers this week began hauling decades-old quilts out of storage at the Spencer Museum of Art, they did more than shake the dust off.

More than 20 volunteers worked Monday through Thursday with a staff photographer at the Kansas University museum, tediously unrolling the fragile works from their racks in private storage rooms.

Photos of the quilts eventually will make it into the museum’s electronic database, a five-year project that has nearly cataloged all of the more than 25,000 pieces in the museum’s permanent collection.

After every piece in the museum has been photographed and entered into the database, researchers and art enthusiasts will be able to browse an online index that will include photos and histories of the pieces.

“This will allow somebody to do some research without actually getting the objects out,” said Robert Hickerson, museum photographer and database project manager.

Hickerson hopes to have the staff database updated with quilt photos soon. Students and faculty at KU should be able to access the database by the end of the summer, he said. Later on, maybe within a year or two, the database will be on the Web for anyone to access.

Long process

While Hickerson, working alone, can document a stack of 3,700 prints in seven weeks, bringing the quilts out is more painstaking.

An assembly line of at least five volunteers at a time unrolls, measures, carefully folds and stacks the quilt onto a cart and brings it to a temporary photography studio, where the quilt is raised onto a display board without touching the ground. Afterward, the process is reversed, and quilts are rolled back up with tissue paper.

Working six hours a day through Thursday, volunteers moved only 51 quilts through the assembly line.

Robert Hickerson, photographer and database project manager at Kansas University's Spencer Museum of Art, prepares to photograph a quilt from the museum's collection. The museum is creating a digital image database of the museum's entire collection.

“We can only get through five quilts in three hours,” said Jerrye Van Leer, volunteer and docent coordinator for the museum.

Hickerson quit shooting quilts after Thursday, leaving 137 of the museum’s quilts undocumented for now.

Hickerson and crew have spent hours on the project, although photographs of the quilts already exist.

A Japanese museum shot most of them during an exhibition in 1987. They’re in a book, “American Patchwork Quilt,” but part of the text is in Japanese, the color is off and staff have run into problems getting reproduction rights, Van Leer said.

Quilters dream

Besides, this project has given quilters an excuse to unfurl the vintage pieces, which rarely leave their oversized linen closet. Volunteers from the Kaw Valley Quilting Guild, the Ottawa Quilting Guild, the Maple Leaf Quilting Guild and a number of quilt enthusiasts who don’t actually quilt helped with the project.

“It’s just thrilling to see works over a hundred years old,” Van Leer said.

The quilts date from about 1840 to about 1930.

A stamp on the rear side of one, “Wonder Quilt,” circa 1897, cited 62,948 pieces in the quilt. The artist, Martha Haggard, White Cloud, wrote that she used 24 spools of thread to complete it.

To think: An 82-year-old woman toiled for two years and hand-stitched all the pieces, said volunteer docent Sally Davis, of Lawrence.

“They’re less than the size of a dime!” she exclaimed.

Few people would have the patience to embark on such a project today, Hickerson said.

“It shows how our culture has changed,” he said.