[NHCOLL-L:4583] Re: Core Storage

[Helen Kerbey]

We have a small number of cores at the National Museum of Wales that were 
creating a large problem in storage location, accessibility and cleanliness. 
Some of the boxes had apparently been recovered from a barn and were filled 
with mouse (or maybe rat?) nests and had to be cleaned.

We followed the system used at the British Geological Survey and decanted 
all of our cores that wouldn't fit onto a metre square pallet into metre 
long boxes.  These were cardboard boxes ( I'm not sure but I think they have 
a slightly different name in the USA?) of different widths with lids and the 
first lot we had were old ones donated by the BGS.  Small diameter cores 
were put in in twos, wider ones were placed singly in appropriate sized 
boxes.  The metre long boxes are mostly able to be handled by one person, 
and having the whole lot on a pallet makes them a lot easier to move about. 
The carry string on old boxes is always a weak point so we all wore steel 
toe caps when moxing core boxes about.

This coincided with the building of a new large store where we had a wall of 
pallet racking put in especially for all our things on pallets.  We only 
loaded them up to a certain weight but I can't remember the details at 
present.

Labelling is obviously very important if you are going to decant them as you 
don't want to reverse anything or loose depth markers or the way up of the 
section.  Where depths were actually written on the old boxes we made new 
markers for the new boxes.  We also used a lot of tissue for packing.

Our cores aren't used as much as the BGS ones but having them accessible and 
properly documented means that we can at least now advertise that we have 
them

I have some photos if you would like to see them.

Helen Kerbey

Research Assistant, Laboratory services
National Museum of Wales



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Van Aken, Annette" <annette.vanaken at yale.edu>
To: <nhcoll-l at lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 8:49 PM
Subject: [NHCOLL-L:4582] Core Storage


Happy Friday,

The Peabody Museum has received Yale's Geology Department collections, 
including rock cores, and will be moving the collection to our new West 
campus storage.  The cores are currently stored in old deteriorating divided 
wooden trays in steel racking.  We'd like to re-house the collection.  For 
those of you who have rock cores in your collection, I'd love to hear from 
you regarding your storage system.  Any help is most appreciated.

Thanks for your input and have a great weekend!

Sincerely,
Annette



WEST CAMPUS

Annette L. Van Aken, Project Registrar

Peabody Museum of Natural History

Building A21

Yale University West Campus

PO Box 27384

West Haven, CT 06516

203-737-3267

203-376-5963 cell

annette.vanaken at yale.edu<mailto:annette.vanaken at yale.edu>



CENTRAL CAMPUS

Peabody Museum of Natural History

Yale University

PO Box 208118

170 Whitney Avenue

New Haven, CT 06520-8118

203-432-3799