Planning your new store is at once an exciting and challenging prospect. Get it right and the likelihood is that you’ll have an excellent system that will help to care for and preserve your existing collection, whilst allowing for future accessions. However, get it wrong and the repercussions associated with poor planning and resultant overcrowding are rather unpalatable.
When you consider that in nearly all cases approximately 95% of collections are in storage rather than on display, it seems quite astounding that more focus isn’t applied to storage. Factors such as accessioning and incremental growth are common, yet overcrowding remains a problem, particularly for museums, galleries and heritage collections.
Archivists and librarians tend to take a proactive approach to planning their stores – largely because they have to in order to accommodate the vast number of continuously increasing items in their care However, even the most organised of plans will fail if one doesn’t have the correct storage system to house their collection.
Added complications such as the use of old buildings for repositories also make planning an essential part of choosing the right storage solution to meet your needs. For many a dedicated new store would be ideal, but unfortunately, more often than not, the reality is an old building whose floor loading capacity is not strong enough to support the shelving system required.
Gladly, none of these issues are insurmountable and with the help of a well constructed plan taking into account all of the factors associated with your collection and its storage, you are quite capable of developing the repository you require. This section of the site has been designed specifically to explore the need for planning and to overcome negative factors in order to achieve the optimum storage solution for your collection.
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