Collections Storage Project

A Brief History

The qathet Museum and Archives has been operating since 1967, growing its collection of artifacts and archival material for the past 57 years. As we’ve also remained in the same buildings for the past 57 years, we have finally run out of storage space for our permanent collection. In 2021, the Museum placed a hold on accepting new donations of artifacts. The Museum plans to accept donations once again after the completion of collections storage upgrades.

In the earliest years, the Museum and its collection were managed by volunteers who were life-long lovers of history. More recently, the Museum has seen a high rate of staff turnover, resulting in, like most museums, a backlog of artifacts-to-be, forgotten inventories, as well as incomplete documentation. Part of the collection project will include updating artifact records.

What’s Happening Now

The plan for the collection room sounds simple in nature, but is complex in practice. New, more space-efficient shelving is being installed, and staff will re-organize the collection onto these new shelves. Re-shelving is a methodical process that takes time.

The plan looks a little something like this:

1. We rent a temporary, off-site space to use as storage.
2. We carefully pack up our collection of approx. 12,000 artifacts and move them out of the collection room
3. We order our new mobile shelving
4. We remove the asbestos tiles present on the collection floor
5. We install our new mobile shelving
6. We bring artifacts back from the off-site space in stages, briefly storing each group in our gallery
7. We assess each artifact individually, determining if it still meets our acquisition criteria, and if it does, we correct the object ID number, take a new photo, improve its record and description in our database, properly pack it for long-term storage, and find a permanent space for it on the shelves
8. We formally deaccession and transfer or dispose of artifacts that do not meet our acquisition criteria
9. We have a well-organized and accessible storage space for increased collections care!

Because of the volume of artifacts owned by the Museum, and some hard deadlines for this project (we have to be out of our off-site storage space by a fixed date), staff has realized this is an all-hands-on-deck situation. In order to make this project a success, all other Museum operations have been paused – that means no public visitors, no public programs or events, and no research requests.

These closures and cancellations are temporary. Once staff is confident we’ve made enough headway on the project we’ll have no trouble keeping to our deadline, we’ll gradually be able to reinstate our usual operations.

In The Future

A key goal of this project is to implement collection regulations and standards that will enable the Museum’s collection to be professionally maintained throughout the decades, and even centuries to come. We also hope that after this project is completed, we will be able to share our entire artifact database online for the public to browse, making it easier than ever to access our collection. It will also ensure that artifacts are properly cared for, so that they may last far beyond the lifespan they may have otherwise had.

After the artifact collection project is done, staff also hope to turn their efforts towards some re-organizing of our archival materials, and our archaeological materials (did you know we’re the archaeology repository for the Region?). Re-organized archives and archaeological materials will improve accessibility of the materials we have available. However, those projects are still a ways off.