Last week I discussed some of the measures that went into preparing our 25,000 artefacts to move from the old Medicine Hat Museum and Art Gallery into the new Esplanade. This week, I’ll finish the tale with the move phase, and the post-move work.
Prior to the move, I attended a workshop on preparing artefacts for shipping (I know—who knew there were workshops on stuff like that?). The instructor cautioned that the most vulnerable time for an artefact in transit, the time it’s most likely to be damaged, is when it’s handled by non-museum people. That was a pretty big factor in our decision to move most of the collection with museum staff, rather than use a moving company. We did use movers to handle about 70 of our biggest, heaviest, most awkward pieces (pianos, sofas, a Link trainer, shown in the above photo being loaded into the truck, etc.); the rest was carried out by museum staff and our wonderful volunteers.
Every box (almost 2500 of them) was numbered, and every artefact that went into each box was inventoried. Each box on every shipment out of the old building was recorded, whether that shipment was in a rented truck, the Museum’s van, or our Director’s private vehicle.
The first stuff to move was about 1,000 objects that needed to be installed in our Permanent Gallery. These moved mostly through the fall of 2005, and were all in place by the gallery’s opening on December 11, 2005. The rest moved in dribs and drabs through early 2006, then in a crazy two weeks in April (when we rented a 24 foot truck), the bulk of the collection moved downtown. A few more shipments were made in the Museum van through May and June, with the last shipment on June 26.
That was no where near the end of the move for us, though. Now we had about 24,000 pieces inside about 2300 boxes—that all had to be unpacked, checked against the box inventory, put on into a new storage location, and inventoried there. Several of our sainted volunteers from the packing/moving phase stayed with us through the unpacking, which took about two years. After that, one of our volunteers took on the job of entering all of our inventory data (which was recorded the old-fashioned way—with pencil on paper) into our collections database. That took about another two years, finishing up in early 2010. Meanwhile, our ever-faithful volunteers—we have four of them still, of the ones who originally signed up to help move—took on other projects; photographing the artefacts, data entry, conducting research, etc.
As in any move, though, there’s still the odd box or two that for some reason or another wasn’t unpacked. As of this writing, we have 90 boxes still outstanding. Some of these (at least 30) we know were in fact unpacked in the mad rush to complete the Permanent Gallery in December 2005; a few others look to have been counted twice, and several dozen packages, mostly containing one artefact apiece (a few floor lamps, a “Flood Relief” sign from the great flood of 1951, a stained-glass window, etc.) that are difficult to store, and that we haven’t unpacked just because we haven’t figured out just where to put them.
This brings me ‘round again to just why I’m explaining all this, at this time of year…
For 2011, the Esplanade Museum resolves to finally finish its 2005 move!
Prior to the move, I attended a workshop on preparing artefacts for shipping (I know—who knew there were workshops on stuff like that?). The instructor cautioned that the most vulnerable time for an artefact in transit, the time it’s most likely to be damaged, is when it’s handled by non-museum people. That was a pretty big factor in our decision to move most of the collection with museum staff, rather than use a moving company. We did use movers to handle about 70 of our biggest, heaviest, most awkward pieces (pianos, sofas, a Link trainer, shown in the above photo being loaded into the truck, etc.); the rest was carried out by museum staff and our wonderful volunteers.
Every box (almost 2500 of them) was numbered, and every artefact that went into each box was inventoried. Each box on every shipment out of the old building was recorded, whether that shipment was in a rented truck, the Museum’s van, or our Director’s private vehicle.
The first stuff to move was about 1,000 objects that needed to be installed in our Permanent Gallery. These moved mostly through the fall of 2005, and were all in place by the gallery’s opening on December 11, 2005. The rest moved in dribs and drabs through early 2006, then in a crazy two weeks in April (when we rented a 24 foot truck), the bulk of the collection moved downtown. A few more shipments were made in the Museum van through May and June, with the last shipment on June 26.
That was no where near the end of the move for us, though. Now we had about 24,000 pieces inside about 2300 boxes—that all had to be unpacked, checked against the box inventory, put on into a new storage location, and inventoried there. Several of our sainted volunteers from the packing/moving phase stayed with us through the unpacking, which took about two years. After that, one of our volunteers took on the job of entering all of our inventory data (which was recorded the old-fashioned way—with pencil on paper) into our collections database. That took about another two years, finishing up in early 2010. Meanwhile, our ever-faithful volunteers—we have four of them still, of the ones who originally signed up to help move—took on other projects; photographing the artefacts, data entry, conducting research, etc.
As in any move, though, there’s still the odd box or two that for some reason or another wasn’t unpacked. As of this writing, we have 90 boxes still outstanding. Some of these (at least 30) we know were in fact unpacked in the mad rush to complete the Permanent Gallery in December 2005; a few others look to have been counted twice, and several dozen packages, mostly containing one artefact apiece (a few floor lamps, a “Flood Relief” sign from the great flood of 1951, a stained-glass window, etc.) that are difficult to store, and that we haven’t unpacked just because we haven’t figured out just where to put them.
This brings me ‘round again to just why I’m explaining all this, at this time of year…
For 2011, the Esplanade Museum resolves to finally finish its 2005 move!
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