The textiles and clothing department in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences is looking for volunteers to help inventory its 6,000-piece costume collection.

Jane Farrell-Beck, a textiles and clothing professor and curator of the collection, said the department has been promised an inheritance by ISU alumnus, Edward Waldee.

The endowment by their estate will aid in the remodeling of the storage area and the conservation of the collection.

Farrell-Beck said the collection is used mainly for classes.”We want to make it accurate and readily available to researchers,” she said.

The collection contains clothing from almost every country. Most of items were donated.

“The oldest pieces are about 260 years old,” Farrell-Beck said, “We have fragments that go back 1,500-2,000 years.”

Farrell-Beck said one of the most fragile pieces is a dress worn by suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt.”A student has built a support for it. The silk on the inside of the dress is splintering.”

Farrell-Beck said a lot of people view the clothing collection annually, including high school students who plan to attend ISU.

The department is looking for 10 volunteers with some knowledge of textiles and clothing to help with the inventory.

“We will be having teams working for two hour blocks of time and they will be making descriptions of the clothing,” Farrell-Beck said.

Sara Kadolph, an associate professor of textiles and clothing and manager of the collection, said, “We need to know what we’ve got and where it is.

“We are doing the inventory so that we can remodel and store things properly. We need to know what we have in order to plan,” she said. “We practice preventive conservation, how things are stored, the things they’re stored with and the environment in the storage facility.”

The clothing collection is in Lebaron Hall. The new room will be in the same wing of Lebaron.

Interested students should contact Farrell-Beck at 294-4233 or Kadolph at 294-3012.