museum – The Peabody

Contributed by Lainie Schultz

Emperor Franz I and his natural science advisors

This summer I went to visit a friend in Vienna. I hadn’t seen her in [*cough*] years, so my inspiration was mainly just to hang out with her. It was only after I had my plane tickets and the trip was drawing near that I actually started looking into what there was to do in Vienna.

Turns out, the Venus of Willendorf is there. For a museum nerd I don’t tend to visit that many museums when I travel, but the Venus of Willendorf is famous enough (there’s even a cast of the original here at the Peabody) and I am nerd enough for that to justify seeking her out. This meant dragging my friend to the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien.

If you had asked me beforehand what I expected of the place, I’m not sure what I would have said. I’m familiar enough with the broad-strokes histories of museums and their ties to imperialism: As nations started to push further and further out into the world during the Age of Exploration, voyagers brought back evidence of their encounters with new environments in new places, creating displays that combined minerals, plants, animals, and man-made “curiosities.” These collections offered opportunities for viewers to learn about the world, as centered by their home locations, but equally they offered opportunities for displayers to demonstrate their status and wealth, the power of their influence and access – not just how they saw the world but how they wanted others to see them in it. If you look for it, this history is written into the architecture and design of museums, and I have been academically trained to look for it. So maybe if you had asked me beforehand what I expected of the Naturhistorisches Museum I would have said “nothing new.”

Reader, I was wrong.

This place was every piece of museum history I had ever learned, jacked up on steroids. It was everything I had been taught to expect dialed up to a ten, with a little extra more thrown in just for fun. It was contemporary best practice crammed into 19th century display cases surrounded by imperial displays of awe and wonder, and I was there for every moment of it. Just please don’t ask me much about the exhibits themselves! I was far too distracted to notice.

Neither my photos nor even the museum’s does this place justice. Try exploring a bit more with some select collections, online exhibits, or a virtual tour.

Contributed by John Bergman-McCool

Two months ago, I wrote about the process of moving the collection in advance of renovations to our building’s basement and moving it back after renovations were complete. In this blog, I thought I could briefly cover how we organized the collections when we moved back in.

Before embarking on any large-scale collections-based project it is a good idea to know what comprises the collection. As noted in the moving blog, the seeds of the renovation started with the 2017-2021 inventory and rehousing project. Understanding the size, weight, and material of the collection was instrumental for us to plan where it would all go. It also helped us select the appropriate type of furniture to best suit the items’ individual storage needs.

Quantify the collection

We worked with a design team from the storage furniture company we contracted to help us make the most of the space we had available. The designers needed to know how much space was required to house the items we steward. Thinking of the future, the figures we gave them included room for growth. We hoped we wouldn’t be at capacity as soon as the renovation was completed.

The dimensions for items held in standard sized boxes was straightforward. We provided more detailed dimensions of the large items and boxes. Shelving for these items would need to be more strictly planned to accommodate individual item and box dimensions.

Capacity, layout and review

The building renovation contractors provided the storage furniture design team with precise room dimensions that included height restrictions required by lighting, HVAC, electrical, and fire suppression systems.

Based on our needs and the space available, the design team gave us a series of shelving layouts. We double checked the dimensions of shelving- length, depth and shelf heights- to ensure that the collections could fit. The design team and our collections team went through several drafts before we came to a finalized layout.

Organization

Once we knew the basement’s storage capacity, we set about creating an organizing principle for the collection. Collections in each space were organized by region. Unboxed items were organized first by type, followed by region. Space on fixed shelves was reserved for items at risk of rolling off mobile shelving.

Future

We’ve been living with the renovation for several months now and are very happy with the results. We have contemplated making a change to the organizational structure of the standard-sized archival boxes. In the future we may organize collections by site or collection area within their broader region. Understanding the scope of this project will require data manipulation to better understand. It may mean moving items between boxes, in which case we’d have to weigh the benefits against the resources required to see an organizational schema such as this carried out.

Tag: museum

Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

Organizing a Collection