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Boxes, boxes and more boxes! « The Polar Museum: news blog

The Polar Museum: news blog

Boxes, boxes and more boxes!

At the moment, our museum store is full of boxes of all shapes and sizes:

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We are lending some objects from Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Henfield Museum in West Sussex, where they will be on display for a week while Henfield Theatre Company perform Ted Tally’s play Terra Nova. The boxes were all out while I tried to find the best (and safest) way to pack the objects for their trip down to Sussex. Some of the boxes have been bought especially for loans and others have been salvaged from other places – we try not to throw anything away as you never know when it might come in handy!

Loans are always a busy time for the conservators, as all the objects have to be carefully checked, photographed, documented and packed before they can travel. Fortunately, I had help from our conservation intern, Ellie Ohara Anderson, who is spending a year working in the University of Cambridge Museums as part of her MSc in Conservation at UCL. Ellie only started with us three weeks ago, but she has already been thrown into the thick of it, helping to install The Thing Is… and preparing for exhibitions at the Polar Museum and the Whipple Museum.

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In the picture above, Ellie is packing a snowshoe that belonged to Captain Oates. The snowshoe is too long to fit into any of the boxes that we had already, so Ellie has had to make a box especially for it. She has used Correx (corrugated plastic sheet), which we use for packaging because it is strong, light and easy to cut. The box has been lined with Plastazote, an inert polyethylene foam that is used a lot in conservation.

It’s important that objects don’t slide around inside their boxes when they’re in transit … but it’s equally important that they don’t get squashed by excessive packaging! There’s a bit of an art to packing objects, and ingenuity is often required as objects don’t come in standard shapes and sizes. We’ve recently started using a new method to secure objects that uses nothing more sophisticated than some pieces of Plastazote foam and a pack of cocktail sticks:

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The object is put on a foam-covered board, and surrounded by foam wedges. Cocktail sticks are pushed through the wedges and into the board, securing them in place, then trimmed so they are flush with the wedges. The wedges avoid putting pressure on particularly fragile areas and can be easily repositioned if necessary. This method is really quick and easy to do (and best of all, it doesn’t cost much).

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We usually send a courier on loans – someone from the Polar Museum staff who can unpack, check and install our objects safely (or pack them up again at the end of an exhibition). This time it’s Willow who is accompanying them: here she is wrapping up the last box of objects before they are loaded into the van.

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Now that our objects have made it safely to Henfield Museum, the conservators can have a rest (and tidy up) … until they come back in 10 days time and we have to unpack them all …

Christina

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