[NHCOLL-L:2051] RE: Moving Collections

[Judith Price]

When we moved the collections of the Canadian Museum of Nature five years
ago, we were lucky enough to convince Treasury Board (the Canadian federal
department in charge of the taxpayers' money) to allow us to spend our move
funding on materials that would stay with the collection.  The idea was to
achieve a condition in which the collection would survive almost anything,
including a move.  We successfully argued that packing materials would be
more costly to purchase and dispose of, would take no less time to
implement, and would expose the specimens to double the risk of handling.

This meant padding instead of packing for things like fossils, shelf bins
instead of cardboard boxes for jars of fluid.  Geological cabinets were used
as shipping containers, then placed on the compactors with very little
unpacking needed to make the specimens accessible.  The original shelves
holding fluid material were labeled to correspond with their destinations in
the new building, the shelf bins were lightly padded and transferred to
mover's bins and the shelf label transferred to the bin.

There were a couple of areas where we couldn't live up to our own standards:
the nifty new PET boxes designed in-house for the mollusc collection could
not be fabricated in time, so we wrapped all the little open cardboard trays
with food-grade plastic bags and placed them in the new geological cabinets
for the move.  We ran out of time to transfer all the birds and small
mammals to the new drawers so some of the old wooden drawers were slipped
into metal ones inside the new cabinets for the move.  We have since caught
up on rehousing these specimens.

I certainly can't give you all the details as this was a team effort of
which I was only a part.  It involved multiple moving firms, and staff from
across the museum gave their time in packing.  But it was certainly a good
outcome for us; I know of only one jar broken out of our several hundred
thousand and the specimen survived (so to speak)!

Judith
 
(Ms) Judith C. Price
Secretary, Canadian Society of Zoologists
Please visit us at www.csz-scz.ca/jpellerin/csz/
Assistant Collection Manager, Invertebrates
Canadian Museum of Nature
PO Box 3443, Station D
Ottawa, ON  K1P 6P4
jprice at mus-nature.ca
tel. 613 566-4263
fax 416 364-4027
 
Please visit us at www.nature.ca