Page 56 - Canadian Geographic

ORGET ABOUT the tables and Logistical problems such as this one Clockwise from above: Paleontology exhibit
chairs. And the microscopes. And come with the territory when a specialist Peter Milot articulates a horse
Fthe 14,000 bird eggs in the orni- museum decides to move, of course, skeleton before packing it; a giant bison skull
thology collections. And the 60-plus live but the sheer scale of the entire exer- awaits its box; ladders and part of a custom-
invertebrates that crawl, scuttle and buzz cise can be hard for the public to wrap made crate; museum mascot Moe the
in the Bug Room gallery. their minds around. mammoth at a museum goodbye party.
Those are — relatively speaking — easy “We’ve got 2.4 million pieces in our
to move. collection and we’re moving about two easier in the new museum than it was
What the Royal Alberta Museum million of them to the new location,” in the old one, which despite expand-
really needed to worry about was the says Chris Robinson, the museum’s ing almost continuously through the
mammoth skeleton. executive director. “How do you move late 1960s and ’70s after opening as the
How was the institution going to get two million pieces? You do it carefully Provincial Museum of Alberta in
the ancient tusked behemoth out the low and you do it once.” December 1967 was still not big
doorways of the venerable old building it To that end, the museum is using a bar- enough to house most of its collection.
had outgrown just west of downtown code system to keep track of what’s gone In the new building, for example, the
Edmonton and into its glittering new out the old doors and in the new ones, amount of permanent gallery space has
$375.5-million home that occupies 38,000 which are expected to open to the public more than doubled, while the storage
square metres of prime real estate in the sometime in 2018. As of mid-January, areas have 2½ times the capacity com-
more central Arts District? about 71,000 bar codes — “That’s 1.6 kilo- pared with the old building.
By taking off its head, naturally. Six metres long,” says Robinson — had been Robinson believes all that space will
museum staffers detached the approxi- applied to the approximately 422,000 arti- help future-proof the museum, the col-
mately 36-kilogram skull, lowered it to facts and specimens relocated so far. lections of which will only keep growing.
the ground with a scissor lift and … Displaying and storing those mil- “History doesn’t stand still,” he says.
moved on to the next item. lions of artifacts is going to be much “And neither does the museum.”

56 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC MARCH/APRIL 2018