Sorting out the stores

Written by Eloise on Saturday March 12, 2022

All the way back in March 2020 the Museum applied to the Association of Independent Museums Collection Care Grant (funded by The Pilgrim Trust). The Museum’s stores had seen better days and we really wanted to make sure our fantastic collection was being kept safely and could be more easily accessed by staff and researchers. We found out we had received the funding just as we were closing our doors, not knowing when we would return.

18 months later and we were finally able to welcome back our wonderful volunteers and start spending the money! We bought new metal shelving units, piles of acid free archive boxes of all sizes, clear sleeves to store documents and an exciting new ‘Museum Vac’ to safely clean objects. A team of volunteers and two members of staff have been working hard ever since and are making a great change to the stores. Everything is beginning to look neat, tidy, safe and easy to find.

There is more we need to do, and more money we need to find to do it! Our volunteers are continuing to try and get everything in our collection digitally catalogued and safely stored. In the future we hope to make the Museum database available online so that anyone can search through the objects we aren’t able to display. We are also getting a new understanding of exactly what we have, and new ideas on what we can get out in the galleries.

This seems a good chance to add a reminder that we are an independent museum and rely entirely on income from admissions, the museum shop, donations, fundraising and grant funding to survive. We do not receive regular government or council funding. We are non-profit and anything we earn goes straight back into making the Museum a better resource for our community.