Huron County Council Approves Motion To Look Into The Cost For Providing More Storage Space For Museum

by Bob Montgomery

Huron County council has passed a motion giving the green light to use funds from the county Museum's budget to look at the cost of acquiring more storage space.

County Librarian and Director of Cultural Services, Beth Rumble, says the museum continues to collect more artifacts as donations come forward that fit with their collection plan and at the same time they're also looking at deaccessioning artifacts that don't fit their collection plan. ”When we take in new objects we do look at the story behind it and if it has a strong tie to Huron County so they can decide what they want to keep.”

Rumble says that process is on-going so they make the best use of the space the have, but they also recognize that at some point they will run out of space. They have a consultant's report from 2014 that looked at their need for space going forward. They projected that they would need between twenty and twenty-five thousand additional square feet of space to accommodate their needs over the next twenty years, given their current rate of collection. She says they haven't had a report since then and so they brought it before council this past week to ask permission to use their funding to get an up to date conceptual design floor plan and then an estimate for construction and council approved a motion allowing them to do that.

Rumble says there is a process they follow when they deaccession something, and on some occasions they find something that they acquired several years ago might be more relative in a neighbouring museum so they'll offer it to them. It would still go through the normal process, but she says they do work closely with other museums to try and get items to the museum where they're most appropriate.