It’s not every day that you celebrate getting new shelving, but that’s just what the Museum at Campbell River is doing.
For years now they have had their storage at maximum capacity, but finally this February they are getting the long-awaited museum-grade mobile shelving units installed in their artifact storage room.
The artifact storage room houses not only approximately 6,000 artifacts, but also archival holdings including manuscripts, diaries, photographs and other records that document the history and development of the region.
Maintaining these documents and making them available to the public as needed is one of the critical roles that the Museum plays in the community.
“I can’t tell you how gratifying it will be to finally have top of the line museum quality shelving to house the ‘community treasures’ in the Museum’s collection,” said Sandra Parrish, executive director of the museum. “As is often the case with less appealing behind the scenes equipment projects such as this, securing funding is infinitely more challenging than, in our case, a higher profile exhibit.”
Parrish goes on to note “Unfortunately in 1994 when the Museum relocated to this purpose built building the available funding did not extend to installing the specialized shelving necessary to house the collections.
“Over the years we have made do with what we could but the need to improve the shelving had become critical in order to preserve the collection.”
The first phase of shelving will allow the Museum to re-house their archival holdings, including important collections such as the Elk River Timber co. records, the papers of Roderick and Ann Haig-Brown, former MP Tom Barnett’s local office papers and numerous other holdings relating to our unique coastal history.
It will help to preserve these documents for future generations.
The archival holdings have to be moved during the installation process, so the Museum Archives Research Centre will offer only very limited service in January and February.
For information about the Museum Archives contact Megan.Purcell@crmuseum.ca.
The online archival resources offered by the Museum will not be affected by the move.
This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada. Numerous private donors also contributed to this project and without this community support this project would not have been able to go ahead.