Huron County Council Brought up to Date on Space at the Museum

by Bob Montgomery

Huron County's Librarian and Director of Cultural Services brought county council up to date on some of the challenges they're facing with space at the museum at last week's council meeting.

Beth Rumble says as the museum collects more artifacts, space can become a challenge. “We're always doing work to relocate collections that aren't part of the museum or reorganizing our materials to open up space. But at some point the time will come when we may not have space for additional artifacts.”

Rumble says they also like to move the exhibits around occasionally so that people coming to the museum get to see something new from time to time. “We do have a couple of temporary exhibit galleries at the museum so that we can show case new and different artifacts that are part of our collection and we're always re-visiting our permanent galleries as well to make remedial changes to those if there's new artifacts coming into the collection that we want to put on display. So there's always something new to see when you go to the museum. It's not just put in storage, never to be seen again.”

Rumble says one of the projects they're currently working on will allow people to look right into storage through windows that they can open and see some of the artifacts that are on the shelving units there, so that's another way that people will be able to see more of the artifacts in their collection. Rumble says they would never give something away just because they didn't have room for it but they are constantly going through their collection to see if there are items in there that don't actually meet their mandate and when someone donates something that does, they may keep that one and deaccession the one that doesn't have that strong Huron County connection.

Rumble say some artifacts are sensitive to things like temperature or humidity and that makes it more difficult to find storage space for them. She says they have a collection that is currently in museum space that is not museum artifacts so their current priority is to move those items out and then assess how much space they have.