The battered, barely recognizable baseball, foun in the 1940s inside a wall of a home built in 1880, was authenticated by experts at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. (Michelle Pemberton / The Star)

James H. Nottage holds a handmade Northern Cheyenne social dance shield, from around 1900, prized by the Eiteljorg Museum. Nottage, the museum's chief curatorial officer, says the shield recently was authenticated and is slated to be displayed later this year. (Frank Espich / The Star)

Dale Ogden, chief curator of cultural studies at the Indiana State Museum, opens a drawer containing the rib bones of a mastodon. Fossils of the prehistoric animal, estimated to have been almost 50 years old at its death, were found on the Gurnz farm in Northern Indiana. (Michelle Pemberton / The Star)

George Jo Mess' "Highway No. 4," a 1951 etching with aqua-tint, is owned by the Indianapolis Art Center.(Photo provided by the Indianapolis Art Center)

Dale Ogden, chief curator of cultural studies at the Indiana State Museum, opens a drawer containing the rib bones of a mastodon. Fossils of the prehistoric animal, estimated to have been almost 50 years old at its death, were found on the Gurnz farm in Northern Indiana. (Michelle Pemberton / The Star)

Inventor Thomas A. Edison was among famour people who autographed index cards for an Indiana State Museum project. (Michelle Pemberton / The Star)

An Earlham College crew unearths a 24-foot-long dugout canoe discovered just north of Conner Prairie in 1965. It dates to the time the Delaware people lived in that area, and had been weighted and used as the foundation of a dam by about 1825. (Photo provided by Conner Prairie)

"Self-Portrait #3," a 1997 lithograph by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is in the collection of the Indianapolis Art Center, which had two shows of the Indianapolis-born writer-artist's works. (Photo provided by the Indianapolis Art Center)

If you've combed the galleries of your favorite local museum, carefully inspecting each and every item on display, you might think you're familiar with its complete collection. Wrong.

"With all museums, there are always things in storage," says James H. Nottage, vice president and chief curatorial officer for the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. "When you talk to museum people, they'll sometimes say 'Well, we show about 10 percent of what we have.' That's the iceberg view of things."

Why doesn't a museum display every one of its painstakingly collected items? There are as many reasons as there are artifacts.

In the case of Mary Jane Teeters-Eichacker, curator of social history for the Indiana State Museum, the fragility of the collections under her care -- mainly clothing, costumes and other textiles -- determines her ability to keep them on public view.

"Mostly the reason that something isn't on display is it either has condition issues or it needs to be rotated frequently," she explains. "Any time you have something on display, it's a compromise between what is actually best for the artifact, which is to sit in an acid-free box in total darkness, and what's best for the visitor, which is to be able to see it."

Her solution: She'll put a particular item in one of the museum's galleries for six months, and then return it to storage for two to three years. "You make these rolling compromises," she says.

Some artifacts may need repair.

"They have deteriorated over the years or suffered some sort of damage," explains Jesse Speight, supervisor of art storage and packing for the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

"So they're pending restoration of some kind, some kind of conservation work."

And others may simply be waiting for the right exhibit at the right time.

"We have temporary exhibitions all the time," Speight says, "and they're theme-driven. And so an item might be perfect for a certain scholarly outlook or something that will catch the public's attention, and it's just waiting for that curatorial notion."

Here's a look behind the scenes at several items you most likely won't see the next time you decide to browse through a local museum.

The Indiana State Museum

The object: A wound-cord, horsehide-covered, stitched baseball dating back to about 1865, as verified by The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Discovered tucked between the walls of a La Porte, Ind., home during a 1943 renovation, the baseball has been determined to be one of the two or three oldest known in existence.

Why it's not on display: Its fragile condition. Acquired by the Indiana State Museum in 2004, the baseball "doesn't really look much like a ball anymore," says Dale Ogden, the museum's chief curator of cultural history. "The stitching on the horsehide let loose, so it looks like a clump of tightly wound cord surrounded by strips of leather. ..... It's stable. It's not going to deteriorate any further. ..... We just don't want to stress it any more."

Stored in a custom container provided by the Baseball Hall of Fame, the object could briefly make public appearances as part of a themed museum exhibit (on, say, the state's history of sports and leisure). "But it's not something that we would want to bring out a long time as part of our standard interpretation of Indiana history," Ogden says.

The object: A multi-piece Art Deco dresser set dating to the late 1920s/early 1930s. Individual items include a clock, picture frames, a vase, grooming tools and a tray.

Why it's not on display: It doesn't fit with the museum's current displays. The set, Teeters-Eichacker says, is beautiful, made of celluloid with inlaid Z-style patterns of lilac and green. But museum displays from this time period focus on the sacrifices of the Depression -- and the opulent set "is not a Depression piece," she says.

"We usually try to (display) pieces that have a personal history; they belong to somebody, they played a certain role in history, something like that. This has only its completeness and its outstanding good looks ..... there's just no place that I can put it out."

The object: A collection of 100 index cards with signatures of famous individuals, collected by the Indiana State Museum during the 1920s and '30s. Most likely gathered as part of the period's interest in handwriting analysis, the cards contain autographs from such high-profile names as presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, along with Thomas Edison, Will Rogers, Paul von Hindenburg, Queen Marie of Romania and her daughter, the Princess of Romania.

Why it's not on display: The collection doesn't fit with the museum's goal of focusing on "the major facets of Indiana history from the birth of the earth to 2000," according to Teeters-Eichacker.

The people who signed the cards, Ogden says, have no connection with the Hoosier state. In the 1920s, that didn't matter. "At one time, museums were considered to be either repositories of the bizarre ..... or a repository of strictly the extraordinary," he explains. "They collected the signatures of extraordinary people because, theoretically, there was evidence in there somewhere as to why that person was extraordinary."

The cards are in good condition, he says, and represent a part of the museum's history, so they remain a collection worth keeping. "We don't want to say, 'We wouldn't collect that kind of material anymore, (so) we're going to get rid of anything we wouldn't collect,'." Ogden stresses. "We don't want to maintain a collection that's based exclusively on the current thinking as to what museums' roles are, because those (ideas) change over the decades."

Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art

'The object: a Cheyenne dance shield dating to the early 20th century.

Why it's not on display: The museum has been working both to verify its authenticity and to establish its "cultural sensitivity," Nottage says.

The shield, made of painted muslin stretched on a hoop and draped with eagle feathers, was an original donation from Harrison Eiteljorg, the museum's founder and an active collector. "We wanted to make sure that it wasn't a fake or a reproduction," Nottage says. "But our biggest concern was cultural sensitivity. And in our particular museum, that's of paramount importance."

Some American Indian shields hold religious significance, or perhaps were used in warfare, Nottage says. However, a prominent Hungarian scholar in the field of American Indian material culture has confirmed that the object is, in fact, a social dance shield.

"He described it as a national treasure because of the artistry that went into its creation and its verity," Nottage says. "Now that we have discovered that it is culturally significant but not sensitive, that it is indeed real and that it is a very important example, we are going to put it on exhibit."

By mid-May, he adds, visitors should be able to see the "remarkable" and "visually stunning" piece.

Indianapolis Art Center

The objects: Works by early Art Center faculty members, as well as architectural sketches by Michael Graves and works by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Why they aren't on display: The Indianapolis Art Center by nature is not a collecting institution, focusing instead on a mission of spotlighting "artists making art today," says Joyce Sommers, the center's president and executive director. "Ours is about the activity itself, of the energy that comes out of creativity."

Still, the center maintains a permanent collection of works by its founding faculty, items that aren't on public display but that hold deep meaning for the institution and its current staff. Items include the 1939 pastel work "Hooverville" by acclaimed artist William Kaeser, the first faculty member of the Indianapolis Arts Student League; life drawings by Elmer Taflinger (1891-1981), who taught at the Art Center until the mid-1960s; etchings by printmaker George Mess; and, more recently, Graves' architectural renderings and sketches of the center's current building, ARTSPARK and grounds.

"We also have some work from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who was very involved behind the scenes as a supporter of the Art Center," says Patrick Flaherty, exhibitions associate. "We had two very important shows of his work, and have collected from those shows."

The items, Sommers says, represent "the beginning and where we are now ..... They're our inspiration."

Conner Prairie

The object: A dugout canoe dating back to the early 1800s.

Why it's not on display: The piece fits perfectly with Conner Prairie's mission of exploring life in 1800s Indiana -- but its fragility prevents a life on permanent display, says Tim Crumrin, deputy director of museum experience.

When discovered in 1965, the canoe was embedded in mud and gravel in a tributary of the White River, about two miles north of the museum. The tulip poplar canoe was carved from a single log. At a length of 24 feet and 4 inches, however, it may have been too unwieldy to navigate the river, or perhaps it became too old to use. In any case, by about 1825, the 1,900-pound vessel was apparently anchored in place and weighted with stones as the foundation of a dam.

Under the direction of Earlham College, the canoe was excavated the year it was found. Once freed from the earth, it traveled via moving van to Richmond, where it was "placed in a specially built tub lined with plastic sheeting and bathed in a solution of polyethylene glycol, a preservative, to prevent the wood from cracking and warping as it dried," Crumrin explains.

While it has been loaned to the Indiana State Museum, its public display time is limited to preserve the nearly two-century-old piece.

- By Julie Cope Saetre Star correspondent