Every time Canterbury Museum technicians Jane Comeau and Sarah Cragg open a cardboard box they have no idea what they will discover inside.
It could be a tiny chess table standing a few centimetres high, an illustrated bible the size of a thumbnail or a grandfather clock no taller than a smartphone.
Jane and Sarah are part of a project to inventory and catalogue every miniature object in the much-loved dolls house from the Christchurch Street. The work involves opening cardboard boxes, unwrapping the carefully packed treasures inside, then photographing and creating a detailed digital record for every object, no matter how small.
“It’s one constant unboxing video,” Jane says while Sarah unwraps one particularly ornate doll.
But the project is much larger than just the dolls house. The aim is to ultimately create a digital inventory of the Museum’s entire collection of 2.3 million objects.
Museum Collections Inventory Project Manager Kristen Ramsdale says the project is really important for staff to know what we have and where it is.
“The aim is to methodically go through every box in all of the Museum’s storage areas and ensure that everything has a number, a photograph, a location and we have these listed on our database” she says.
“This project is also important for access to the Museum collection. It means that if anybody requests to see something that perhaps their family donated – or for research - we can locate it easily.
“A lot of the objects we are cataloguing are going online as well so people can access them without having to come into the Museum.”
It is a massive task that will take decades to complete. The Inventory Project began in 2017 and has so far added 450,000 objects to the Museum’s database. The Inventory Team adds about 100,000 objects a year, with about 1.8 million objects still to go. Large collections have now been fully digitised, including the W A Kennedy Collection of around 22,000 lantern slides, the Sir Heaton Rhodes Collection of 7,800 stamps and 5,000 watercolours in the Cranleigh Barton Collection.
Kristen said it was common for many historic museums to not have a full digital record of their collection.
“In the past when things came into the collection, some things were documented well, while others weren’t, just due to time and staff availability. It is pretty common for museums to not have everything listed on a digital database.”
In one of the basement storerooms at the Museum’s Rolleston Avenue building about a third of the objects had no record in the database.
The Inventory Project will also help inform the creation of more than 60 exhibitions and displays for the New Visitor Experience in the redeveloped Museum. Museum staff will be researching, creating stories, designing, building and installing 6,500 sq metres of exhibition and display space, which is 50% more than the old Museum.
“We are working on the Inventory Project alongside the New Visitor Experience development,” Kristen says.
“For us to put new and exciting displays together we need to know the objects that we have in the collection. The aim is that the doll's house will go back into a revitalised Christchurch Street in the new Museum.”
And if you were wondering, a total of 333 tiny objects in the doll's house have been added to the inventory.
