Looking back, Looking Forward (The Move, Part 1)

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is often a time of reflection on the past year, and looking ahead to the year about to begin. It’s been that way for a long time; the very month of January is named for Janus, a Roman god with two faces that always looks forward and back at the same time. This week, I’m looking back at an event that has been major concern at the Museum for a number of years—and one that I’m looking forward to completing in 2011; our move into the Esplanade.

Some of you may be thinking, “didn’t they move to the Esplanade, like, five years ago?” And so we did; sort of. The Esplanade building was completed in 2005, with our first travelling exhibit installed in October that year, and the permanent museum gallery opening in December. But as anyone who’s ever moved into a new house can tell you, getting functional in a new space is a long way away from being fully moved in.

Our preparations for the move began in 2003, with the building of new storage boxes for our glass and ceramic collections. These had previously been stored on free-standing open shelves—the kind you might find at a Value Village store (I must admit, I thought twice about making that comparison, as it’s not the most flattering to the Museum—but it does give you an accurate picture). While low-tech, that system worked fine in our old building (which, by the way, was located by the junction of Higways 1 and 3—Wynz Night Club occupies the building now). But, back then the shelves were set up firmly on the basement floor; in the Esplanade, the glass and ceramics are stored on a high-density mobile shelving system. This is a really cool system that has all of our shelves on platforms that roll along tracks in the floor. That way, we can jam them all together, and only need space for one aisle, which we can open up anywhere we need it. This enables us to get a lot more stuff on the same floor space. Problem is, with mobile shelves, even the most efficient will still create a bit of vibration. This vibration will make glass and ceramics “walk” across the shelves, with disastrous results if and when these fragile pieces walk right off the edge. So, our exhibit technician Sam Ferrier made over a thousand plastic boxes to house these collections, with an average of six or eight pieces per box. The individual pieces still move around a bit due to vibrations, but they just move a little in their own plastic cells; the boxes are too heavy to be moved by the vibrations. These boxes not only prepared the glass and ceramics for the Esplanade, but also essentially packed them for the move.

Our other collections also had to be inventoried and packed for the move. We couldn’t really start that until 8 or 9 months before the move. We had to shut down our old exhibits before we could start packing because we a) needed to get the artefacts out of those exhibits in order to pack them, and b) because we needed the gallery space to store the packed collections until the Esplanade’s storage area was ready to move into. But, we had to do more that just throw things into boxes; we had to be able to track every artefact in every box, in case we needed a particular piece before the unpacking was completed. The only way we were able to get it done was through a group of fantastic volunteers that contributed hundreds of hours to inventory and pack more than 20,000 pieces.

This is starting to get a bit wordy, so I’ll leave it for now, and pick up next week with the move and unpacking process, and where we are with it today.

Happy New Year, everyone!