Saturday, 20 September 2014

Museum Storage Hints For Home

By Karina Frost


Great archival institutions put a lot of thought and effort and expense into storing artworks and historical and scientific artifacts. While you might not be able to afford complete museum storage solutions for your personal belongings or your company's items, you can still learn from these masters. Read on to discover some museum inspired concepts that you can adapt for everyday use.

Museums and libraries prioritize, putting the most resources behind the preservation of their most important irreplaceable artifacts and objects. If you don't have the money, time, or energy to protect all of the items you want to store, which are the most important? Concentrate on protecting the things you have that are truly one of a kind, rather than worrying about all your objects equally.

Archival quality packaging materials are the only way to keep your most valuable objects safe from wear, tear, and time. Choose acid free paper for the envelopes and mats that are part of storing your flat goods, like artwork. UV glass in frames protects art from fading color pigments due to sun exposure.

Rotate things in and out of your storage area frequently, so that you can enjoy what you have. Many museums change their displays every few months. If you haven't swapped an object or artwork out of the archives for a long time, it might be time to let it go.

If you don't have enough floor space to display everything you have, use visible containers for your storage space. Transparent clear shelves, bins, or drawers made of glass or plastic let you see what's inside, while maximizing your use of vertical space. You can pack items in from floor to ceiling, fitting a lot inside a single room or closet, when you are able to peek inside thanks to visible containers.

Be sure that you're only storing objects you really want or need to keep. Prune frequently, and consider adopting what experts in decluttering have nicknamed the "one in, one out" rule. With this rule, every time you acquire a new object, you jettison something you already own, so that the total number of objects in your possession stays the same. When you prune away things you don't need, you make more space for the personal artifacts and possessions you really care about.

The attitude that museums and other archival institutions like libraries take is that the best of the past is worth keeping. They don't try to preserve everything in the world, only the objects and items that they feel have true value. Before you worry about grouping your stuff by type, size, or era, be sure that you are keeping only the best and most important items available.

Finally, keep an up to date index or catalog of what you have. As you pack, just write down the contents of each bin or shelf in one big document on your computer. This creates a digital list you can search later on so that, just like a museum, you will know where all of your objects are, making retrieval a snap.




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