Edinburgh Museum’s Collection Centre

Yesterday afternoon we walked to the collection store of Museums & Galleries Edinburgh which houses items from 5 institutes (including Edinburgh Museum, Museum of Childhood, and People Story Museum). We met the Collections Care staff who gave us a tour of the storage area. There are a number of challenges they are facing including space constraint (not enough space to adequately store all the objects) and also the challenge of interpreting controversial objects (such as black dolls) when these are on display. It was interesting to see how they were storing the objects, and how each object and shelf was labelled. The objects weren’t been stored in ideal conditions due to lack of space and lack of budget.
There was a broad range of objects including ceramics, glass, costumes, dolls, prams, dollhouses, radios and mannequins. Some people were a bit creeped out by the dolls and the mannequins.