The Museum in the museum: stored collections and their usability.

Abstract

Throughout time museums have accumulated various items, of which only a part has been put on display. In museums all over the world, due to different circumstances, a large part of museum collections is held in storage, which makes them unavailable to the public. This reality affects museum in different ways: from an economic point of view and from a social dimension. The present study sheds light on how museums are facing the issue of improving the accessibility of their collections and presents an overview of the strategies museums are adopting collected from a survey of 131 museums worldwide, evaluating the adequacy of the resources allocated to the storage activities. The findings suggest suitable strategies to increase accessibility to collections, according to the type of collection and governance of the museum. The thesis explores four case studies to provide a deeper analysis of the matter in the real-world context, two of which are deeper studied through direct interviews with 406 visitors and museum staff. The selected main case studies (the Schaudepot of the Ruhr Museum in Germany and the Depot of the Boijmans Museum in the Netherlands, beyond EMMA in Helsinki and the Collections Centre of Tampere Museums, both in Finland) deal with the visible storage solution. By accessing visible storage, people can see items stored and shown with a higher density than that typically made in the main museum galleries. The results of this study provide museums with alternatives to enhance the usage of collections and fulfil people’s needs associated with the consumption of stored collections. Finally, the thesis provides a scheme concerning ‘considerations for optimising storage conditions’, a crucial requirement to strike the significant balance between preservation and accessibility.