Curatorial staff have been preparing for the return of the reserve maritime collections to a new store in the city centre.
Following a full refurbishment of the building, purpose-built racking has been installed to ensure the collections are stored in the most appropriate conditions for safeguarding their long-term preservation.
More than 40,000 objects are due to return over the coming months, each a physical reminder of Hull’s extensive maritime past.
Behind the scenes, the return of such a large collection is taking a significant amount of planning. Ranging from small objects and documents to large ship models and paintings, the size, weight, materials and fragility of the objects are being considered to ascertain the most suitable layout for the stores.
Detailed spreadsheets have been created to enable us to plan which order the collections will return in, and to log and track objects once they are on-site.
On arrival, the outer packaging used to transport the objects will be removed before the collections are examined and allocated to a specific place within the stores.
Technicians will assist us with carefully lifting some of the larger, heavier objects into their assigned location.
Once the process is complete, the lengthy task of updating our collections database to ensure the information remains accessible for the future will get underway.
