Museum storage crunch damages artifacts

With boxes of bones, fragments of fossils and crates of ceramics, the hundreds of thousands of objects tucked away in the labyrinthine basements below Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology appear to have come straight out of an Indiana Jones archaeological adventure.

However, unlike the Holy Grail from Indy's adventures which was displayed for the whole world to admire, many of Penn's valuable artifacts are relegated to subterranean basements and hidden storage rooms, where they are frequently damaged and often remain unseen by the general public for decades.

"Virtually none of the collection is on display," said one of the museum's former summer interns. "The storage areas are filled with absolutely beautiful vases, jewelry and other objects which will never be displayed and are sitting there, rotting and decaying in the same bags they have been in since they were excavated."

In fact, although Penn's collection boasts between 750,000 and 1 million artifacts, only a tiny fraction is ever displayed in the museum at any given time, leaving the majority of objects in almost perpetual storage.

"We have only 1 percent of the collection on display," said Xiuqin Zhou, senior registrar of the museum. "The majority of the collection is in storage -- not because we don't want to display it, but because we simply don't have the room."

Museum officials emphasize the fact that almost all of the stored artifacts are duplicates -- objects which closely resemble those which are actually on display in the museum's galleries.

"If you go down to storage, you will see 100 pots that all look the same to the general public," said Pam Kosty, the museum's assistant director for public information. "Because they look so similar, we don't need to display them all, but we need to keep them because they are very important to scholars in their research."

However, in recent years, because of the sheer magnitude of the museum's growing collection, many of the artifacts have been crammed together, making it difficult to keep track of the entire collection and even more difficult to access individual pieces.

Of the nearly 1 million objects in the museum, only 360,000 of them have been individually catalogued in the museum's electronic database. The remaining objects are catalogued on cards, sometimes only in groups, impeding the ability of researchers to efficiently seek out and study many of the museum's materials.

"It was getting really difficult for researchers to access a lot of the objects," said museum work-study student and College sophomore Joanne Baron. "We definitely got to the point where we needed more storage space."

To respond to this increasingly salient problem, the museum has recently expanded, adding the Mainwaring Wing for Collections Storage and Study, which is used almost exclusively for storage space. The $17 million wing, completed in May 2002, has helped to improve the museum's storage problems, according to officials.

The state-of-the-art facility is climate-controlled and pest-resistant, helping the museum to preserve previously endangered perishable organic-based materials by rescuing them from storage rooms that date back more than a century. This has helped the museum to maintain at-risk artifacts, enhance scholarly study and permit classes to view the objects.

"Before we built the new wing, it was very crowded," Zhou said. "There were boxes and boxes of things that you couldn't even see, which were at risk because of the unstable temperatures and pests. But the new wing has greatly helped us in the storage and protection of the objects."

Although eagerly anticipated by officials as a panacea for the storage problem, in reality, the new wing has helped only certain museum departments, leaving several of the collection's pieces in equally grave danger.

"The [new] wing has definitely helped the storage problem," the intern said. "But only for certain departments. Specific departments with more organic material had priority for the space, leaving other departments' organic and fragile items in the old basements."

In addition to building the Mainwaring Wing, the museum has also attempted to address its storage problems and the inaccessibility of many of its artifacts by releasing a small part of its collection through both loan and traveling exhibition programs.

"You would think that everything in storage just sits in musty basements all the time," Kosty said. "However, through traveling exhibitions and loans, that is not necessarily the case."

And while they do provide an opportunity for the general public to see some of the museum's prized pieces, a number of issues -- including security, fragility and moving difficulties -- prevent fewer than 1,000 objects from traveling at any given time, leaving over 98 percent of the collection in storage.

Although solutions like the traveling programs and the Mainwaring Wing have provided a measure of relief to the museum's storage problems, due to the remarkable size and diversity of the collection, the overall effect of such changes is relatively limited, according to museum officials.

"Storage is still a really big problem for the museum," the intern said. "It's not a lack of concern or caring on the museum's part, but the University doesn't give them nearly enough money, so they can't renovate existing storage areas or build new ones, which they definitely need."

"Even after the renovations, it's still crowded in storage," Zhou said."What we really need is another wing or two."

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