When the contents of the Tirocchi dress shop at 514 Broadway were offered to the RISD Museum by Dr. Louis Cella, Jr., the first task for the curators was to make a complete inventory of everything they found. There were thousands of items in the shop rooms, including business records as well as garments, textile pieces, notions and trims, and accessories such as handbags and belts. It took the curators a year just to inventory the contents of the shop.

The paper materials included business correspondence, client letters, employee pay books, client books and bills, suppliers' bills and receipts, programs from couture showings, promotional materials from vendors, photographs, household bills, and personal correspondence. Some of these documents, in particular the client transaction ledgers, and personal and client correspondence and measurements, have been transcribed and made available here for online research. In addition, lists have been compiled of all the people who worked for the Tirocchis or patronized their shop, with background information from city and census records. This information helps to round out the picture of the clients' lives and interrelationships.

The most extensive cataloguing task, however, was the complete description of the objects. This included specifying where each object was found, assigning identifiers for its storage and location in the museum's collection, and describing the object's dimensions, colors, materials, and any tags or labels associated with it. In some cases, a photograph of the object was included in the inventory record.

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