It’s been a big year for the artifact collections of the Peace River Museum. In a previous blog, we brought to you the history of Cabinets of Curiosity and told you about our own versions of these cabinets which would be set up this year. This new type of exhibition is happening because we are undertaking a complete collections inventory for the year. It’s a big job but we’re up to the task.
So far, we have removed every object from the collections room and inventoried it. This cleared the room in preparation for our new rolling shelving!!! The shelving, pictured below, was obtained through a Community Facility Enhancement Program grant, monetary donations to the Museum, and help from the Town of Peace River. This wonderful new shelving has given us 50% more space in that room than we had previously, which means that all our artifacts are now going to be in a better situation where we can more easily protect and care for them.
The next stage of this inventory is to continue to clean each of the artifacts and move them onto their new shelves. Conservation projects on some of these objects have taken a great deal of time as well. We are also taking photographs of as many of the artifacts as we can.
The Peace River Museum opened in 1967 as a Canadian Centennial Project. In our 44 years of existence, we’ve amassed quite a few artifact donations. This amounts to about 8000 objects in our collection. That’s a lot of artifacts to inventory, clean, conserve, photograph and re-shelve. But, since January we’ve made great progress and we look forward to continuing with this worthwhile project.
The Cabinets of Curiosity exhibit will be up for the 2011 year. Keep an eye on our blog and website for an upcoming Family Fun Day!
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